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Space trip prices skyrocket
19/07/2007 12:02 - (SA)
Mike Schneider
Cape Canaveral, Florida - The price of space tourism is rising.
The cost of flying to the International Space Station aboard a Russian Soyuz spaceship is up from about $25m earlier this year to about $30m to $40m for trips planned in 2008 and 2009.
"It's mostly because of the fallen dollar," Eric Anderson, president and CEO of Space Adventures, the sole company to broker trips with Russia's space agency, told The Associated Press on Wednesday.
A US dollar currently is worth about 25 1/2 Russian rubles, compared to 32 rubles in 2002.
Five space tourists - American Dennis Tito; Mark Shuttleworth, of South Africa; American Gregory Olsen, Iranian-born US citizen Anousheh Ansari, and Hungarian-born US citizen Charles Simonyi - have visited the space station via the Soyuz vehicles through trips brokered by Space Adventures.
The company announced on Wednesday that two more Soyuz seats have been purchased for tourists to fly in 2008 and 2009.
Simonyi paid $25m for his 13-day trip in April, while the others paid in the ballpark of $20m.
Anderson said the space tourists flying in the two new seats likely would be an American and an Asian, but he offered no further details. Prospective space tourists must put down a 20% deposit, pass physical examinations and later undergo training at Russian's space facility.
About a dozen prospective space station tourists are in the process of reserving spots to go on the space station, even as the number of available seats on the three-man Soyuz vehicles is likely to diminish after the space shuttles are grounded in 2010.
Nasa is going to rely on the Soyuz vehicles to deliver astronauts to the space station between the end of the shuttle program in 2010 and the expected first manned flight in 2015 of the next-generation spacecraft, Orion, which Nasa hopes takes astronauts back to the moon by 2020.
Additionally, the three-member space station crew, consisting of US astronauts and Russian cosmonauts, is expected to double in size in 2009.
"We're certainly working out ways to get more seats," Anderson said. "With the competition at that point, it becomes more difficult."
- AP
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