Space travel firm plans its next giant leaps

Alan Boyle Science editor • Profile • E-mail

This week’s trip to the international space station serves as the big payoff for millionaire passenger Greg Olsen — but it also represents a big payday for Space Adventures, the Arlington, Va.-based firm that arranged three multimillion-dollar trips to the station and is planning for much, much more.

In the seven years since its founding, the privately held company has built a business out of sending a select few clients to the orbital frontier, and putting many more through spaceflight experiences on Earth — ranging from tours of Russian space facilities to zero-gravity flights.

Space Adventures' next giant leap would be finding some ultra-deep-pocketed clients who are willing to pay $100 million a seat to fly around the moon and back in a souped-up version of the same Soyuz craft the Russians used to send Olsen to the space station. It may sound like pure science fiction — but Eric Anderson, the company's president and chief executive officer, says the venture has a good chance of moving forward.

"We've got several real candidates for that project," he told MSNBC.com. "I'm confident that we will find candidates for that program."

As usual, Anderson is keeping mum about the identities of those candidates. Over the years, Anderson has learned to stay quiet about his high-profile prospects until the contracts are signed and the money is coming in.

Turning a profit
Another thing Space Adventures doesn't talk about is how much the company gets out of the reported $20 million fare for flying to the station, after Russia's Federal Space Agency takes its share. But Anderson will say that the "biggest portion" of Space Adventures' revenue comes from its fee for arranging space station trips, even though the "biggest number of customers come for space training and space experiences on Earth."

He's also willing to say that the company is doing quite well, thank you very much.

"Right now we're not actively seeking investors," Anderson said. "We're profitable now, and we have investors."

Among those investors are former astronauts, travel executives and computer industry types such as Richard Garriott (son of a Skylab astronaut as well as a millionaire game developer) and Esther Dyson (daughter of the physicist Freeman Dyson as well as a venture capitalist).

The company has expanded just in the past few months, opening up a Tokyo sales office as well as a small operation in Cape Canaveral, Fla., to track developments in the commercial spaceflight market.

Smooth sailing for space passengers
The space station passenger business has come a long way since California millionaire Dennis Tito became the first customer back in 2000. Tito seemed to face setbacks at every turn: He started out dealing with Amsterdam-based MirCorp for a ride to Russia's Mir station, but switched over to Space Adventures after the Russians decided to send Mir to its doom — pulling the rug out from under MirCorp in the process.

Then NASA tried to get Tito kicked off the flight, on one occasion barring him from training at Johnson Space Center. In the end, NASA agreed only grudgingly to let Tito into the space station.

"Tito's ability to enjoy the training and plan for his spaceflight was eclipsed by wondering whether or not he was able to go," Anderson recalled.

Since then, NASA and Russia's space agency have agreed on a procedure for accepting paying passengers, and space tourists (or, to call them by their official title, spaceflight participants) now sign contracts with both agencies.

In 2002, South African millionaire Mark Shuttleworth's trip to the space station went smoothly, and Olsen says NASA has been consistently supportive of his mission. Although NASA isn't planning to get into the tourism business itself, the agency thinks it's just fine for the Russians to do so.

"It's where we want to go," astronaut Jim Newman, director of NASA's human spaceflight program in Russia, told MSNBC.com. "We want to make space accessible to as many people as possible."

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