Google co-founder aims for space

Alan Boyle Science editor • Profile • E-mail

Google co-founder Sergey Brin has put down $5 million toward a flight to the international space station with the company that has sent millionaires and even a billionaire into orbit.

Virginia-based Space Adventures announced the identity of the future space traveler as well as its vision for the next decade of space tourism at a New York news conference on Wednesday.

As part of the deal, Brin paid a $5 million deposit to Space Adventures, which would secure him a spot on the future Russian Soyuz flight to the station. The price tag for such a trip has run from $20 million (or less) to $35 million (or more). Thus, if Brin goes through with the purchase, he'll be paying millions more in the years to come.

Space Adventures' co-founder and chief executive officer, Eric Anderson, said Brin could choose to fly as early as three years from now, or 2011.

He said Brin would be the first of six founding members of an "Orbital Mission Explorers Circle" who would be granted access to future flights in return for the $5 million deposit. In a follow-up phone call, Anderson told msnbc.com that another would-be space traveler — whom he would not name — contacted him just minutes after today's news conference. "I spoke to the person, who just signed up for the No. 2 spot," he said.

The company reached an agreement last month with Russia's space agency to purchase a Soyuz flight exclusively for its own purposes in 2011, and that would be the first opportunity for members of the Explorers Circle to fly, Anderson said. Two spots on that flight would be available for paying passengers, with a professional Russian cosmonaut in the driver's seat.

Space Adventures' arrangement for the 2011 flight is different from how the company has handled its other multimillion-dollar trips — which involved tagging along on a regularly scheduled "taxi flight" to the station. "We will be the first company to undertake a private mission to the international space station," Anderson said.

The 34-year-old Brin, who founded Google along with Stanford schoolmate Larry Page a decade ago, was the moving force behind his company's sponsorship of the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize. That competition would reward the first teams to put a privately funded probe on the moon.

Brin and Page have long been fans of the space effort.

"I am a big believer in the exploration and commercial development of the space frontier, and am looking forward to the possibility of going into space," Space Adventures quoted Brin as saying. "Space Adventures helped open the space frontier to private citizens and thus pave the way for the personal spaceflight industry. The Orbital Mission Explorers Circle enables me to make an immediate investment while preserving the option to participate in a future spaceflight.”

If he goes through with the flight, Brin could become the richest human to go into space. He ranks as the fifth-richest American on Forbes magazine's 2007 list, with an estimated net worth of $18.5 billion.

Looking back, looking ahead
Space Adventures used Wednesday's news briefing as an occasion to celebrate its 10th anniversary in the space tourism business — and look ahead to the next 10 years.

The company reached orbit in 2001 when it brokered the precedent-setting spaceflight of Dennis Tito, a California-based investment adviser whose trip to the international space station shook up NASA officials. After Tito's trip, the space agency was more accepting of Russia's millionaire spaceflight participants, all of whom were Space Adventures clients:

• South African Internet tycoon Mark Shuttleworth in 2002.
• American scientist-businessman Greg Olsen in 2005.
• Iranian-American entrepreneur Anousheh Ansari in 2006.
• Hungarian-American software billionaire Charles Simonyi in 2007.

Its sixth orbital client, video-game guru Richard Garriott, is due to fly to the station in October. Garriott will become the first son of a NASA astronaut (Owen Garriott) to go into space himself.

Space Adventures also has a seat reserved on a Soyuz flight scheduled for next April, and Anderson said the customer for that seat would be named later this year.

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