go to outer space

MOJAVE, Calif., Dec. 2 /PRNewswire/—A travel entrepreneur who introduced hundreds of thousands of Americans to European travel in the 1960’s has taken luxury travel to new heights – the edge of space.

Jules Klar, founder of Phoenix, AZ-based RocketShip Tours, has announced that his company will immediately begin selling rides to the edge of space for $95,000 per flight. Participants will fly aboard the Lynx, a two-seat suborbital vehicle being built by California-based XCOR Aerospace.

“Years ago, my dream was to introduce the world to new travel opportunities at prices that were consistent with a unique experience,” said Klar. “In 1961 I created $5-A-Day Tours in partnership with Arthur Frommer that enabled thousands of Americans to see Europe at affordable prices.” After moving to Arizona, Klar created Great American Travel, a high-end boutique operation specializing in luxury cruises and tours. “We’ve helped thousands of sophisticated adventurous travelers visit exotic destinations all over the world including Antarctica, where they developed a deeper appreciation for its beautiful, pristine and fragile environment. Today, I am very proud to announce this partnership with XCOR Aerospace to offer participants an out of this world experience – a front row seat to the edge of Space.”

“The natural evolution of human exploration knows no bounds. RocketShip Tours and XCOR have come together to usher in the private sector’s role in space exploration. There is no doubt that a new era of pioneering space enthusiasts is emerging. In fact, prior to signing this agreement with RocketShip Tours, XCOR had already taken paid reservations for approximately 20 flights,” said Klar.

XCOR Chief Test Pilot and three-time Space Shuttle Pilot and Commander, Rick Searfoss said the Lynx will carry people or payloads to the edges of space up to four times a day. Seated next to him in the co-pilot seat, participants will undoubtedly experience the thrill of a lifetime. The awe- inspiring view of the curvature of Earth, the thin blue mantle of the atmosphere below, and inky blackness of space above will provide participants with unforgettable memories beyond description.

XCOR officials discussed the technology used on the two-seat, fully reusable launch vehicle that takes off like an airplane, and lands the same way, while Chris Gilman of Orbital Outfitters, a NASA spacesuit contractor, demonstrated the spacesuit technology that will be worn by those flying in the Lynx. Gilman, winner of an Academy Award for special effects, said the suit is both lighter and safer than older NASA spacesuits.

Klar said he was inspired by the revolutionary Lynx suborbital vehicle because it offers participants a unique and intimately personal experience. “You’re sitting in a cockpit in the co-pilot’s seat beside your astronaut pilot, with a panoramic view of the stars above and Earth below. It is the ride of your life!”

“I am going to fly aboard the Lynx because I want to experience space from a front row seat,” said Danish investment banker Per Wimmer, who will take the first commercial flight aboard the Lynx. Wimmer, based in London, has already earned a reputation as a pioneering adventurer. He recently made the first tandem skydive over Mt. Everest, and maintains a website, www.wimmerspace.com. Wimmer, who uses his adventures to promote various charities, says, “My goal is to place the Dannebrog, the Danish flag, on the Moon one day. Flying to the edge of space aboard the Lynx will make me the first Dane to experience suborbital space flight and takes me one step closer to my ultimate goal.”

Klar said his company is enlisting innovative and progressive travel professionals to sell seats on the Lynx. “Those who are interested in a suborbital space flight can visit our website, www.rocketshiptours.com, and choose a Space Tourism Specialist who is trained and certified by RocketShip Tours.”

The total cost of the Lynx flight experience is $95,000. A deposit of $20,000 begins the process of assigning the participant to the qualification program. Klar said one does not have to be an athlete to fly aboard the Lynx, but the procedure will include a medical questionnaire and a screening performed by qualified aeronautic physicians. Instruction regarding life support systems, flight physiology, and other aspects of the Lynx suborbital flight will also be provided. “We want to ensure the experience is as safe as possible and that people are adequately trained and prepared.”

“Since this is a suborbital launch, training will require familiarization with the spacesuit and what will be experienced while sitting in the cockpit.” Klar said. “We will provide deluxe accommodations for all those who share in ‘The Right Stuff’ experience we offer and become part of this historic stage in the evolution of human space flight.”

“After the flight is concluded, participants will receive an HD DVD recording of their flight experience as well as other mementos,” Klar said.

XCOR COO Andrew Nelson noted that RocketShip Tours’ announcement marks an important milestone in space exploration efforts. “American entrepreneurs are succeeding – we are bringing down the cost of space flight and making it affordable,” said Nelson. “What is most astonishing is that competition has already reduced prices before a single vehicle has flown. What a fabulous holiday gift this is going to make for many people who thought they had everything.”

“I’ve had a long career in travel, and I have found that we are not offering a destination, so much as we are offering an experience that appeals to the pioneering spirit inside all of us,” said Klar. “This type of adventure is truly transcendent because it widens our horizons, and teaches us not only about the world we live in, but something about ourselves as well. I believe that the view from space aboard the Lynx will undoubtedly be positively life-changing in ways we can only dream of.”

RocketShip Tours, Inc. is the General Sales Agent for XCOR Aerospace and exclusive global provider of participant services for the Lynx suborbital vehicle. Located in Phoenix, Arizona, RocketShip Tours was founded by Jules H. Klar, an innovative travel entrepreneur.

XCOR Aerospace is a California corporation located in Mojave, California. The company is in the business of developing and producing safe, reliable and reusable rocket-powered vehicles and propulsion systems that enable affordable access to space.

SOURCE XCOR Aerospace
Copyright 2008 PR Newswire. All Rights Reserved.

That is the current price tag. Not easy but very doable.

Right now two valid options:

http://www.masonhorvath.com
http://www.virgingalactic.com

Not very likely but dare to dream right…?

Jul 28 02:18 PM US/Eastern

British tycoon Richard Branson on Monday unveiled a futuristic aircraft that will ferry tourists to the edge of heaven as part of Virgin Galactic’s much-anticipated space program.

The aircraft – WhiteKnightTwo – was rolled out for invited guests and media at an early morning ceremony in the Mojave desert, north of Los Angeles, at the headquarters of aerospace firm Scaled Composites.

The high-altitude aircraft, also named “Eve” in honor of Branson’s mother, will act as the mothership for the spacecraft Spaceship Two, which in turn will launch in midair and send two crew and six passengers hurtling into space.

The first flights of WhiteKnightTwo are expected to take place later this year, with Spaceship Two being attached for a maiden flight sometime in 2009.

Virgin Galactic is hoping to send its first paying customers into suborbital space some 110 kilometers (70 miles) above the earth in 2010. The company has said more than more than 200 passengers have already signed up for the first flights, which will cost 200,000 dollars each.

“The rollout of WhiteKnightTwo takes the Virgin Galactic vision to the next level and continues to provide tangible evidence that this most ambitious of projects is not only for real but is making tremendous progress towards our goal of safe commercial operation,” Branson said in a statement.

Branson said the decision to name the launch vehicle after his mother reflected the pioneering spirit of his space tourism venture.

“We are naming it ‘Eve’ after my mother, Eve Branson, but also because it represents a first and a new beginning, the chance for our ever growing group of future astronauts and other scientists to see our world in a completely new light,” Branson added.

In an interview with CNN, Branson later said that he and members of his family would be among the first wave of space travelers, and admitted he expected to be nervous at take-off.

“I’m going up myself, and I’m sure my stomach is going to turn, my children, my parents are going up,” Branson said.

“There’s going to be an element of nervousness, but it will be I think the journey of a lifetime .. So, you know, you’ve got to have a little bit of nervousness. It’s natural.”

WhiteKnightTwo boasts a wingspan 140 feet (43 meters) and is the world’s largest carbon composite aircraft, Virgin Galactic said.

With a maximum altitude of more than 50,000 feet (15,240 meters), the twin-fuselage craft will be able to support up to four daily spaceflights, the company added.

WhiteKnightTwo was designed and built by Scaled Composites, a California-based aerospace company run by engineer Burt Rutan.

In July last year, three people were killed after a rocket being developed by the company in connection with the Virgin Galactic program exploded.

My comment: I predict I am about 10 years away from this goal.

I want to fly,float,and jump high.GO TO PB&J.com in 2008 or 2009!

“You can’t remove this goal since you’ve dared yourself to complete it. You must mark it complete, or give up on it.”

Says the robot co-op… It’s still on my list, but not something I’ll be focused on for another 10-15 years so…

By Nicola Clark

Sunday, September 16, 2007

PARIS: The week after Richard Laronde returned home from a 16-day trek to the South Pole in January, he bought a ticket to outer space.

For Laronde, who had also journeyed to the North Pole in 2006, making the decision to splurge $200,000 on one of the world’s first commercial spaceflights took about as long as it takes to do a Google search for “space tourism.” “As soon as I got back from the South Pole, I got on the Internet,” said Laronde, 56, who owns a prospering event-planning business in Boston.

Within days he had wired a $20,000 deposit to an accredited space travel agent in New York.

“Astronauts were my heroes growing up,” said Laronde, who came of age in the early years of the U.S. space program. “It’s always been a childhood dream.”

With a personal net worth of more than $5 million, Laronde has the means to transform this particular fantasy into reality. And as a steadily growing number of companies have come to realize, he is not alone.

There are already several dozen space tourism ventures in various stages of development worldwide, analysts say, offering experiences ranging from a brief trip to the outer limits of the Earth’s atmosphere to an extended stay in a zero-gravity space hotel. Public and private investors in places as far flung as Dubai, New Mexico and Singapore are preparing to invest hundreds of millions of dollars to develop full-blown “spaceports,” complete with hotels, museums, Imax theaters and other space-themed diversions.

With the first paying passengers expected to take flight sometime in late 2009, Futron, a market research firm, predicts that as many as 14,000 space tourists will be heading into space each year by 2021, generating annual revenue of more than $700 million.

“There is quite a contest going on at the moment between a number of companies,” said Walter Peeters, dean of the International Space University in Strasbourg, France. “I think people underestimate how fast this is developing. For the companies who succeed, it could be very, very lucrative.” The leading entrepreneurs driving this recreational space race include several household names, including the British billionaire Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com. But major corporations, including European Aeronautic Defense & Space, the parent company of Airbus, are also investing significant sums in projects designed to deliver well-heeled adventurers into space.

Branson’s venture, Virgin Galactic, is by far the most advanced in its plans, with test flights on its six-passenger space plane scheduled to begin next year. The company, which counts Laronde as a customer, says it has already received more than $24 million in deposits from about 200 would-be space tourists in 30 countries.

For their $200,000, these individuals will receive four days of specialized training followed by a three-hour flight involving just five minutes of weightlessness at an altitude of 70 miles, or 110 kilometers, above sea level. From there, the company says, passengers will be able to see 1,000 miles in any direction, as well as the curved blue line of the Earth’s atmosphere against the black sky of space. If all goes according to plan, Virgin Galactic says it expects to fly its first passengers in late 2009 or early 2010.

Virgin’s six-seat space plane, which is expected to cost more than $100 million to develop, is being built by Scaled Composites, an aerospace startup based in California that was acquired in July by Northrop Grumman. Branson’s Virgin Group expects to invest a total of $240 million of its own funds in the space flight project by 2013, money it expects to quickly begin to recoup once regular services begin.

“We would hope to be profitable within the first three years of flying,” said Will Whitehorn, a Virgin Galactic spokesman.

EADS Astrium, the space division of the European aerospace giant, unveiled plans this summer to develop its own four-seat space plane, with tickets to sell for around $150,000. The company is currently in discussions with a number of private investors and commercial partners with an eye to raising as much as $1 billion to finance the project by early 2008.

François Auque, the president of EADS Astrium, said in June he hoped the plane, which is expected to enter commercial service in 2012, would “wake up the space ambitions of Europe.” The project, he added, could also generate valuable technological spinoffs with other commercial and military applications.

Would-be rivals to Virgin Galactic and EADS abound. They include Benson Space, based in California, which plans to send its first test passengers into space in 2009 aboard a vertically launched craft that can reach space in just 15 minutes. Space Adventures, based in Virginia, claims to have more than 200 reservations with paid deposits worth $3 million, for a 90-minute ride on a modified Russian spacecraft sometime after 2011. (Space Adventures is best known for brokering deals with Russia to send the first three space tourists into orbit for a reported $20 million a person.)

Analysts say that Virgin’s two- to three-year head start on the competition should guarantee a steady stream of revenues for the company initially.

But forecasters at Futron and others predict that as the number of available seats on space planes increases, ticket prices will drop quickly – possibly as low as $40,000 – bringing a joyride into space within reach of nonmillionaires.

“Tourist number 150 will not be willing to pay the same price as tourist number five,” said Peeters of ISU.

Hence the need for the space tourism industry to quickly diversify its offerings, analysts say. A small handful of companies is already planning for this second phase, which would bring passengers to an orbital station, or space hotel, where they could spend several days in a weightless environment, roughly 200 miles above the Earth.

One prospective space resort operator is Galactic Suite, based in Barcelona, which aims to host its first guests in 2012. Created last year by a group of European engineers with backing from Spanish, Japanese and Middle Eastern investors, Galactic Suite expects to charge around $4 million for an adventure that includes eight weeks of training on a still-unspecified Caribbean island followed by a three-day stay in space. The company says it already has 28 prospective tourists signed up, who will be asked to advance half the ticket price as a deposit by the end of 2008.

But the real money, some analysts predict, is likely to be made from earthbound ventures linked to the personal space flight industry. The U.S. state of New Mexico has joined with Virgin Galactic to build a $225 million spaceport and visitors center by 2010 in the desert near the U.S. Army’s White Sands missile base. Space Adventures, of Virginia, together with the government of Singapore, is planning to spend at least $115 million to build a similar facility there, along with a second $265 million spaceport in the United Arab Emirates.

Xavier Claramunt, a founding director of Galactic Suite, said his company’s Caribbean spaceport development would include resort villas and offer outdoor activities such as golfing and scuba diving for tourists to use when they’re not busy training for space.

“It will have all the facilities needed to make the ground experience as exciting as the orbital one,” Claramunt said.

Peeters likened a spaceport to an airport-cum-tourist attraction along the lines of the Kennedy Space Center in Florida or even a Formula One racecourse. “Say you have 30 people racing, but you have maybe 3,000 people watching and spending money,” he said.

“The space tourist who flies brings his family and friends, who have to be occupied for four or five days” while the tourist is trained for the flight, Peeters said. “So in addition to hotels and shops you have flight simulators, maybe a medical facility where the whole family can get space certified. Let them taste space food. Even Imax. You can have a whole infrastructure around it.” New Mexico, for example, expects its “Spaceport America” to generate $1 billion in annual revenue by 2020 and to employ more than 5,000 people.

Still, while the economic possibilities may seem endless to space-travel enthusiasts, some warn that environmental and safety concerns could put off many who could otherwise afford space travel.

“Many people are fascinated with the idea of space travel, but they are afraid that it’s not ecological,” said Jean-François Rial, chief executive of the French travel agency Voyageurs du Monde, which began promoting space tours for Virgin Galactic in July.

Whitehorn, the Virgin Galactic spokesman, said the company was developing a new rocket fuel made from nitrous oxide and oxidized rubber that would power the space plane. “The CO2 emissions per person for one of our space flights will be less than a single business-class seat from London to New York,” Whitehorn said. “It will be the most environmentally efficient space launch system ever developed.”

The question of safety, however, does loom large, especially following a deadly explosion in July. Three engineers were killed and three others critically injured during a test on one of the plane’s fuel tanks.

“These companies are trying to start commercial operations before they really have a track record,” said Marco Caceres, a space industry analyst at the Teal Group, a consulting group based in Virginia. “None of these vehicles has really been tested that much. It is an open question whether the industry will be able to overcome one of these rockets blowing up with passengers on board.”

Laronde, the prospective Virgin Galactic passenger, said the accident was a reminder of the high risks involved in this type of adventure.

“It makes you stop and think for a minute,” Laronde said. “I’m certainly aware of the dangers, and I’ve thought about them, but I’ve never considered that I would not do it.”

My comment: Me neither!

Int’l space station ticket price climbs

By MIKE SCHNEIDER, Associated Press Writer
Wed Jul 18, 8:13 PM ET

When it comes to complaining about poor exchange rates for the U.S. dollar, American tourists traveling to Europe have nothing on tourists headed into space. The cost of flying to the international space station aboard a Russian Soyuz spaceship has increased from $25 million earlier this year to $30 million. Trips planned in 2008 and 2009 will cost $40 million.

“It’s mostly because of the fallen dollar,” Eric Anderson, president and CEO of Space Adventures, said Wednesday. His company brokers the trips with Russia’s space agency.

A U.S. dollar currently is worth about 25 1/2 Russian rubles, compared with 32 rubles in 2002.

Five space tourists have paid $20 million to $25 million to visit the space station via the Soyuz vehicles through trips arranged by Space Adventures. The company announced Wednesday that two more Soyuz seats have been purchased for tourists to fly in 2008 and 2009.

Anderson said the space tourists flying in the two new seats likely would be an American and an Asian, but he offered no details. Prospective space tourists must put down a 20 percent deposit, pass physical examinations and later undergo training at a Russian space facility.

About a dozen prospective space tourists are in the process of reserving flights to the space station, even as the number of available seats on the three-man Soyuz vehicles is likely to diminish after 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 U.S. 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.”

On the Net:

Space Adventures at http://www.spaceadventures.com

Really I don’t know how to change my challenge. This is fun, and it’s a goal, but I would do so many more things before I spent my own money for this. Unless I spent the money on taking myself there, which is a ridiculous longshot(i.e. making my own spaceship…pshyeah, right.)

Whatever, I have dreams.

8D

It looks like I have a few years to wait, and a good $300,000 to save up. What’s a proper trip to the top of Everest cost anyway? This one might not happen, but I still dream :)