Russia's
space agency chief has said that thrill-seeking millionaires won't be able to
buy tourist flights to the International Space Station after 2009, according to
Russian news reports Wednesday.
Anatoly
Perminov, director of Russia's Federal Space Agency, reportedly told the daily
newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta that 2009 is the last year in which space
tourists will be able fly
to space station due the lack of available seats on Soyuz spacecraft as the orbiting laboratory
shifts to a larger, six-person crew later this year, according to the Russian
news service Ria Novosti.
The
International Space Station is slated to double its current
three-person crew size in late May. Since 2001, six space tourists have
visited the station by paying between $20 million and $30 million under deals
brokered with Russia's Federal Space Agency by the U.S. firm Space Adventures
in Vienna, Va.
The next
space tourist, American
billionaire Charles Simonyi, is due to launch to the space station in March
along with the orbiting laboratory's new Expedition 19 crew.
Simonyi is
paying a reported $35 million for what will be his second trip to the space
station. He last visited the orbiting laboratory in April 2007 on a 13-day
spaceflight that he paid more than $20 million for. Since then, ticket prices
rose to about $30 million due to inflation, Space Adventures officials have
said.
Simonyi's
second trip costing an extra $5 million beyond that due to his membership in
Space Adventure's Orbital Missions Explorers Circle program, an elite club of
six people who have put the $5 million down in order to jump to the head of the
line for available flights.
High-ranking Russian space officials and cosmonauts met with the Rossiiskaya
Gazeta (or Russian Gazette) for a round table meeting on Jan. 15 to
discuss the future of the nation's manned spaceflight program, according to the
Russian aerospace firm RSC Energia, which posted photos of the meeting to its
Web site.
According
to Ria Novosti, Perminov said that Simonyi and a Kazakh national
will fly to the International Space Station this year, with the Kazakh
spaceflyer to launch in October, aboard Russian-built Soyuz spacecraft. But the
plan to double space station crews up to six astronauts will prevent future
space tourists from finding room on regular Soyuz flights.
Last year,
Space Adventures announced its plans to launch the first private
Soyuz spaceflight to the space station. That mission, slated to launch in
2011, called for a crew of two paying passengers and a professional cosmonaut
commander to fly to the International Space Station. Space Adventures officials
were not immediately available for comment late Wednesday.
Ria
Novosti also
reported that Russia does not plan to cancel any of its planned launches to the
space station this year. The Federal Space Agency is expected to launch
additional crewed Soyuz capsules and unmanned Progress cargo ships to ferry
astronauts and supplies to the orbiting laboratory.
"I
hope that we'll cope," the Russian news service quoted Perminov as saying. "So
far we are preparing to make four manned launches, not two, as previously
planned, and send five, not four, freight modules into space."
advertisement
