Return to Virginia Business - May 2003

2003 Fantastic 50
Service: Space Adventures

by Peter Galuszka
Virginia Business
May 2003

At a once top-secret former Soviet Air Force base 25 miles southeast of Moscow, American “space tourists” get ready for their near-zero weightlessness flight. Doctors from the Russian space program give them quick physical exams and crewmen lead them to an Ilyushin 76 jet cargo plane. Inside the belly of the huge airplane is a large padded compartment. Travelers sit on the floor as the aircraft rumbles off the runway.

At about 30,000 feet, the aircraft goes into a steep climb and then a sharp dive. The passengers start feeling lighter as their legs lift off the deck. The jet does this 30-second-long maneuver over and over and, in time, the passengers experience near-zero weightlessness just as Russian cosmonauts in training do. Some giggle joyfully as they spin in balls without support. Others launch themselves down the long cargo bay as if they were Superman. Some find themselves ill.

Exotic rides like this are one reason Arlington-based Space Adventures has racked up a four-year growth rate that is sky high, too — 1,098 percent. Since it was founded in 1997, the small firm has exploited the constant fascination with aerospace and the needs of the cash-hungry Russian military and space program. “The Russians are holders of the key to a lot of fantastic space technology and only after 1992 was it available to the West,” says Space Adventures President and Chairman Eric Anderson. The 28-year-old former NASA engineer from Colorado is a 1996 graduate of the University of Virginia with a degree in aerospace engineering.

At prices starting at about $6,000, Space Adventures offers an array of aerospace experiences involving Russian-built trainer jets and late-model MiG-29 Fulcrums and Sukhoi-27 Flankers that undergo wrenching combat maneuvers. Tourists can see the blue-black edge of space as they zoom to 85,000 feet in a MiG-25 Foxbat interceptor. The ultimate flight is one that Space Adventures helped put together to propel civilians into space. In April 2001, Wealthy American businessman Dennis Tito paid $20 million to be launched atop a Russian missile to the International Space Station. African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth followed the next April.

Space Adventures does have competition, namely Incredible Adventures, a Sarasota, Fla.-based company that began the concept of space training for tourists back in 1993. President Jane Riefert says that Space Adventures had worked with her firm and then emerged as a competitor. To her knowledge, her firm and Anderson’s are the only ones in the U.S. offering such adventures.

The Virginia firm hopes to build a commercial “spaceport” for space tourism near the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Once opened, perhaps this year, the center will help solidify plans for sub-orbital flights for space tourists. The aim is for tourists to ride on Reusable Launch Vehicles (RLVs) that may be deployed by NASA before 2005. For a cool $98,000, space tourists may be able to undergo training at the Florida center and then wait for slots on the RLVs that fly higher than 62 miles above the earth.

Both companies do face some limitations. The U.S. military generally refuses to let its aircraft be used for tourism, and the Columbia Space Shuttle disaster has grounded U.S. manned space flights. Riefert says that her firm doesn’t push space flight, because after a customer spends millions of dollars in training, “There’s no guarantee that you’ll get approval from a space agency.” Anderson is decidedly more upbeat. “The Space Shuttle flights will resume by next winter, and we’ll be going up again.”

Return to Virginia Business - May 2003