Space Adventures
Space Adventures will soon be offering suborbital flights going up to 62 miles or 100 kilometers. Suborbital means you are not going to go into orbit. You will just be going up, and then down. Suborbital flights last only about five minutes, but they cost about $102,000 per passenger. Before you fly on a suborbital flight, you go to a training program for about four days to learn about the flight and train for it. Imagine training three days for a five minute flight? Space Adventures also insists that you be age 16 or older to ride on a flight.
Orbital flights are much longer than suborbital flights. They are 10 days long. You have to study a lot more too. In orbital flights you would orbit the Earth every 90 minutes and see it from different angles. Space Adventures also has flights for $20 million that go up to the ISS (International Space Station); for $15 million you could go on a spacewalk. This is the only company that offers these flights. Although there are many space companies, Space Adventures is the only one that has successfully launched a non-astronaut to the ISS. Dennis Tito, Mark Shuttleworth, Greg Olsen, Anousheh Ansari, and Charles Simonyi have already journeyed to the ISS.
For $100 million, Space Adventures even offers a mission to the moon. You would be the 7th person on the moon—and the first non-astronaut—and the first person on the moon in the 21st century. On a journey to the moon you would be launched into space and soon after be met by another craft that holds propellant to get to the moon.
If you ride on a Space Adventures flight, you won’t be riding on an American spacecraft. You will be riding on the Russian spacecraft the Soyuz. This is because when the USSR broke up, the Russians lost a lot of money. The Russians decided to rent the Soyuz to Space Adventures so that they—the Russian government and its space program—could earn more money. Seeing as a trip to the ISS costs $20 million, they have been.