MOSCOW (Reuters) -- They have already promised to blast a winning U.S. game show contestant into space and turn the Mir space station into a money-spinning cosmic tourist mecca.
Now, Western investors who bought the commercial rights to the 14-year-old Russian orbiter have announced another project ready for takeoff -- a $117 million stock market flotation that would value their company at $1.3 billion.
Never mind current poor market conditions for initial public offerings (IPO). MirCorp has to convince the Russian government not to turn their only asset into a fireball, let alone deal with a nasty problem of solar flares.
"It's a real company," Jeffrey Manber, president and CEO of MirCorp, told Reuters in a brisk New York accent down the line of his Moscow mobile phone. "We've put in over $30 million and committed to another $20 million this year. We're not wackos."
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MirCorp aims to list shares simultaneously in Europe, the United States and Asia some time in February or March, hoping to tap into the cash held by armchair astronauts everywhere.
"So far, we've been focusing our attention on institutional investors, at the level of 5, 10 million [dollars]," Manber says. "We've been getting tons of e-mails from people saying, 'I want to invest $10,000.'"
The announcement jumped the gun: Manber himself was surprised to hear that his headquarters had already put out the IPO news release Thursday, before MirCorp even picked a bank to underwrite it. But that's a good sign, he says.
"Frankly, we weren't planning to announce it yet, but it got leaked," he says. "It's one of the things that shows just how much people around the world care about this. We're holding meetings and suddenly it's in the friggin' Wall Street Journal."
Supply and demand
MirCorp's business plan is simple. Lots of people want to go to space, and some of them are very rich. Russia has a space station that it can't afford to keep flying on its own.
Match the demand to the supply and presto -- Earth's first commercially funded piloted space program.
Last year, after Russia announced that it was planning to ditch Mir to focus its meager space resources on the new International Space Station, MirCorp rushed in. Since February it paid for a series of spaceflights to keep the station aloft.
It plans to charge $20 million to space tourists -- it calls them "
citizen explorers" -- for a weeklong trip to Mir.
Business looked good. The first customer, an American multimillionaire space buff, is already being put through his paces at Russia's Star City space base near Moscow. Also, James Cameron, director of the film Titanic, said
he'd like to go.
And then, best of all, the producer of the hit U.S. television show Survivor signed on for
Destination: Mir, a game show that would end with the winning contestant being blasted into space. NBC wants to air it in the 2001-2002 TV season.
But last week two top Russian officials made announcements that threatened to blow a big black hole into MirCorp. Deputy Prime Ministers Ilya Klebanov and Alexei Kudrin both said Russia was going to let Mir fall out of orbit and burn up in the atmosphere.
Solar flares and listing shares
A rare shower of solar flare activity has been knocking the Mir off course, and if steps are not taken to boost it soon, it will plummet to Earth.
That requires urgent launches, at a time when NASA wants Russia to use its rocket-launching capabilities to build the new $60 billion International Space Station, already years behind schedule due to Russia's financial trouble.
Manber says the Russians have agreed to send a vital resupply mission to Mir next week, on credit. MirCorp's private and institutional investors have promised to come up with the cash after the launch takes place.
Manber acknowledges that Russia's threat to vaporize Mir is a big problem for his company.
"Officially, we have not talked them out of it yet," he says. "What they are saying is, if you meet your financial commitments, we will boost the Mir."
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