Space is for sale.
While NASA looks ahead toward five years without shuttle flights and struggles to develop the next generation of spacecraft within its budget, the Russian space program has found ways to make space pay. And in doing so, the former Soviet Union has shown that it is leading the way toward capitalism in space travel.
When a Soyuz rocket carries two crew members to the International Space Station on Sunday, there will be a paying passenger aboard. Richard Garriott, a successful computer game designer whose father, Owen Garriott, flew two missions for NASA, will carry science experiments to space and document his journey on the Web — and all for $30 million.
Mr. Garriott is the sixth person to become what NASA calls a spaceflight participant — the space agency frowns on using the term “astronaut” for people who haven’t been selected and trained for the program. But Mr. Garriott hates the term “space tourist,” he said. “This is much more than a mere lark.”
He has, he noted, undergone months of training and plans to bring an array of experiments to the station involving protein crystal growth that could help pave the way for commercial exploitation of the zero-gravity environment. “Space is going to be a very valuable place,” he said, and experiments like his are “what’s going to open the door.”
Russia, however, might not have the monopoly on space tourism for long. Another company, Virgin Galactic, plans to begin taking clients to the cusp of space in the next few years.
The company, founded by Sir Richard Branson, will fly a spaceship designed by Burt Rutan and based on SpaceShipOne, which won the Ansari X Prize in 2004. More than 250 people have put down the full $200,000 fare in anticipation of the first suborbital flights. Other companies, including XCOR Aerospace or Mojave, Calif., are planning suborbital craft of their own.
The idea of people paying their way to space was revolutionary in 2001, when Dennis Tito, a financier, flew to the International Space Station for a reported $20 million aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. Now five people have put money down and strapped in through Space Adventures, the company that arranges the trips.
Mr. Garriott had hoped to take that first flight, but the dot-com stock market crash diminished his fortune and forced him to defer that dream. His interest in space is longstanding and he has used his software fortune to collect items as varied as a spare Sputnik. It was made before the world’s first spacecraft was launched by the Soviet Union on Oct. 4, 1957, three years before he was born. The New York Times wrote about his collection last year.
The training, he said in an interview, has been arduous and fun. He has experienced zero gravity in a plane flying a repeating parabolic course and has felt high G forces in a Russian centrifuge; he and his crewmates nearly collapsed during a drill in which they had to wriggle into their water rescue suits within the stifling confines of a Soyuz capsule — a process he called “the most difficult thing I’ve done.” (Everything went smoothly the next day.)
Eric Anderson, the chief executive of Space Adventures, said that his company is doing for private citizens what NASA does when it buys passage to the International Space station aboard a Soyuz. “Why should government employees be the only ones to go into space?” he said.
For $3 million, Space Adventures offers “backup crew” participation in which customers get all of the training that the spaceflight participant will get — without the flight.
Other companies may not get their clients to space, but they do take advantage of the fact that Russia’s space program has welcomed capitalism with open arms. Mir Corp., a travel company based in Washington state, takes well-heeled tourists to Baikonur to see launches and provides tours of Moscow, including the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center.
Doug Grimes, the founder of Mir Corp, who has been working in the field of Russian tourism since 1987, said tours typically cost about $19,000 per person, and despite the toughening economic times, he said, “you’d be surprised how many people have enough money to take expensive trips these days.”
For a trip scheduled for this month to coincide with Mr. Garriott’s launch, Mir Corp. offered a zero-gravity flight for $5,690 per person, centrifuge training (from $1,990 to $4,490 per person), and space suit training ($4490)
The Russians have strict health requirements for such bonuses as the centrifuge and training in the enormous swimming pool that simulates spacewalking; Mr. Grimes says, “Every time I get somebody who wants to do it, they keep rejecting them.”
Another company, Incredible Adventures, takes clients to the 68,000 feet in Russian Mig-31 fighters, which the company calls the “edge of space.” It is far short of the more than 300,000 feet that is generally considered to be the beginning of space, but it does provide a view of black sky above and is much higher than commercial airliners fly.
If the $200,000 that Virgin Galactic is charging sounds like a lot of money to pay for a few minutes of black sky and weightlessness, Mr. Anderson said, “who would have believed 10 years ago that there were that many people willing to pay $35 million to go to space?”
Or, for that matter, twice as much? On Monday, Space Adventures announced that its fifth client to go to orbit, Charles Simonyi, had signed up for a second trip.
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