2013: Tourist trips to resume to International Space Station

Wed, 12 Jan 2011

San Francisco - Bored with your usual holiday destinations? Space Adventures has an out-of-this world vacation for you.

The US-based commercial space travel company announced Wednesday that thanks to agreements with the Federal Space Agency of the Russian Federation and the Rocket Space Corporation Energia, it was offering three seats per year on Soyuz spacecraft bound for the International Space Station (ISS) beginning in 2013.

Space Adventures said the extra capacity was due to the increase of Soyuz production, from four to five spacecraft per year. Each flight will last approximately 10 days, the company said in a press release.

"We are very pleased to continue space tourism with Space Adventures," Alexei Krasnov, Director of Human Spaceflight of Russian space agency said.

"Also, the addition of a fifth Soyuz spacecraft to the current manifest will add flexibility and redundancy to our ISS transportation capabilities. We welcome the opportunity to increase our efforts to meet the public demand for access to space," he said.

Russia has not allowed commercial passengers aboard its cramped three-seater Soyuz spaceships since 2009 due to their increased workload as the US space shuttle retires this year.

The first space tourist was Denis Tito who traveled to the ISS in 2001 in a trip arranged by Space Adventure. The last private citizen to take the journey was Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberte in 2009. No price for that trip was revealed. But software mogul Charles Simyoni reportedly paid 35 million dollars for his space jaunt earlier in 2009.

Source: Earth Times.
Link: http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/news/362011,resume-international-space-station.html.