If you’ve got $150 million to spare and want to take a trip around the moon, don’t wait for much longer, just one of the two seats that private space company Space Adventures is selling for a proposed lunar flyby remains. After helping to send seven private citizens on eight trips to the International Space Station, starting with Dennis Tito, who became the world’s first space tourist on April 28, 2001, the Virginia-based Space Adventures is mapping out a tourist trip around the moon.
The flight would last about a week and would take passengers around the dark side of the moon and come within 65 miles of the lunar surface. Despite a nine-figure ticket price, the firm has already signed up a passenger for a maiden moon journey. And if it inks a second customer soon, the mission could launch within three to five years, company officials say.
The flight, now scheduled to take place in 2015, will take place on a specially equipped Russian Soyuz. The Soyuz would dock with a rocket booster in low Earth orbit and then be blasted into a free return trajectory, similar to the one Apollo 13 was obliged to use, which will take it around the far side of the Moon and then back to Earth.
There is also an alternative route. They were sent to the International Space Station (ISS) prior to launch to the Moon. This trip will take eight or nine days. The tourists will not land on the Moon, but will rotate around it at a minimum distance of about 62 miles. Tourists can see the moon’s surface is heavily and saw the publication of the Earth which until now only witnessed by 24 people.
That $150 million price tag mentioned above isn’t absolutely fixed, but even as a ballpark figure it dwarfs the already astronomically high price of previous space tourism. But if you’re the kind of person that can reasonably drop $150 million on vacation, you’re probably not going to quibble over a few million more. [Space Adventures]
