ASPEN, Colorado You don't have to pack your bags quite yet, but
passenger travel to the Moon is on the flight manifest of a space tourist
company.
The price per seat will slap your wallet or
purse for a swift $100 million but you'll have to get in line as the first
voyage is already booked.
Space Adventures, headquartered in Vienna,
Virginia, is in negotiations with the customers who will fly the first private
expedition to circumnavigate
the Moon.
"I hope to have those contracts signed by the
end of the year," said Eric Anderson, Space Adventures' president and CEO.
Anderson outlined the future for his space
travel firm during Flight School, a workshop for commercial space and private
aviation ventures, held here June 20-22 at the Aspen Institute.
Lunar leap: free-return
A Space Adventures team has blueprinted a
circumlunar mission using a unique blend of existing and flight-tested Russian
technology. At the heart of the lunar leap is Russia's venerable Soyuz
spacecraft. A pilot and two passengers would depart Earth in their Soyuz,
linking up in orbit with an unpiloted kick stage for a boost outward to the
Moon.
"The Soyuz was originally designed as a
circumlunar spacecraft. It hasn't flown with people around the Moon, of course.
But the Soyuz would fly a free-return trajectory a boomerang
course around the Moon. So there's not a lot that needs to be done to the
Soyuz to accommodate for that...it could probably fly around the Moon right now,"
Anderson told SPACE.com. "There will be some upgrades to the
communications systems...and we would make the window bigger too."
Anderson said that the Soyuz pilot and two
passengers would not go into lunar orbit. "That comes later," he added, as a
follow-on public space travel trek.
A practice run of mission hardware in unpiloted
mode is likely, Anderson continued, "so we would test it all out, even though
we think we could do it [the expedition] without a test flight."
The two-passenger, $100 million per couch flight
adds up to a $200 million mission.
"I personally think that it's the biggest thing
in private spaceflight. It would change the way the whole world thinks about
private spaceflight. It is definitely doable for under the $200 million price
tag," Anderson explained, thereby signaling a radical reduction in cost of any
past piloted lunar flight.
Sales are up
Space Adventures is no stranger to liftoffs of
public space traffic. It bills itself as "the world's leading space experiences
company," with a flight record to prove it.
Among its offerings, the group has handled five
private space trips to the International Space Station (ISS). For example, in
April of this year, Charles
Simonyi took advantage of their services, as did Anousheh
Ansari last September. They joined the ranks of fellow private space
trekkers, Greg Olsen, Mark Shuttleworth, and Dennis Tito each spending roughly $20 million to $25 million for their sendoffs into the heavens.
Sales are up for future public hops to the
orbiting outpost. Customers are lined up for Soyuz seats to the ISS in 2008, in
2009, and potentially beyond, Anderson said.
"We're trying to talk to the Russian Space
Agency about how to increase the numbers of Soyuz flights to the space station.
It is scheduled to go from two to four in late 2009...but there may be ways to
increase the number of Soyuz flights even beyond that in the future," Anderson
noted. "My confidence level is high," he said, that those seats can be filled
with customers.
"I do believe that the Soyuz will be for many
years, maybe not the only, but certainly the most reliable way to get to
orbit," Anderson pointed out. "So it's important for us to continue to expand
that business. I think that the market can bear five or 10 seats per year."
Spacewalking on tap
Anderson said that he has been in the personal
space travel business for nearly a decade.
To date, Space Adventures has sold almost $200
million worth of spaceflights. They've booked flights into the future, even
selling a couple more than the company has announced. Their clients have spent
some 60 days cumulatively in Earth orbit, Anderson said.
And there remains another exploit for the public
space traveler to master a space walk.
"I'm hoping that will happen in 2009," Anderson
said. "We have conditional approval from the Russian Space Agency to be able to
pull this off."
Given the right client matched with the right
training requirements, "I think for a private citizen to go out and do a
spacewalk would be huge," Anderson said. "Of course it'll have to be approved
by NASA and by everyone else. This person will be very well trained...go outside
the airlock and kind of hang around for an hour or two...then come back in."
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