COVID-19 has changed the landscape of the tourism industry and caused a significant impact on tourism consumption and tourism development. However, space tourism, an emerging tourism development, has made significant breakthroughs during the pandemic. For example, in 2021, Jeff Bezos and his two younger brothers took an excursion to outer space on a Blue Origin rocket. Therefore, to clarify how COVID-19 affects the demand for space tourism, this chapter uses a literature analysis method to explore the space tourism articles published since the outbreak (2019.12–2023. 4) using Cite Space software and Web of Science as the object database. The results found that space tourism research during the epidemic showed a fluctuating growth trend compared with the past; space tourism research has not yet formed academic teams, and the number of collaborations among scholars is low. In terms of research hotspots, the epidemic seems to have accelerated the development of space tourism, and scholars’ research topics are focused on the future and challenges of space tourism; Virtual space tourism has been empirically analyzed to demonstrate its susceptibility to COVID-19 influence, an observation preferred by tourists. A model of the space tourism demand mechanism under the influence of COVID-19 has been proposed following the database analysis.Valuable suggestions are made for developing space tourism in the post-epidemic period.