space tourism

If you thought $200,000 was a lot to pay for a Virgin Galactic flight to the edge of space, try $1.5 million. Do note, however, that the steep ticket price includes Leo DiCaprio as your travel buddy.

A bidder at a Cannes charity auction agreed to fork out that much for a seat in space beside the star who played flight-mad Howard Hughes in "The Aviator." The money will benefit amfARa Cinema Against AIDS, hosted by amfAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research.

The winning bid was made by 37-year-old Vasily Klyukin, a Russian living in Monaco, according to Reuters.

"I want to be a bit daring," Klyukin was quoted as saying. "I will have to give up smoking now for sure!" … Read more

If you've got $200,000 to spend on a ticket to suborbital space, your spaceship is nearly ready.

Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo, billed as the world's first commercial space plane, notched an important milestone today by firing its rocket engine during flight for the first time.

The test at Mojave Air and Space Port in California saw the passenger space plane detach from its dual-hull mothership, WhiteKnightTwo, at an altitude of 47,000 feet while being piloted by Mark Stucky and Mike Alsbury of builder Scaled Composites.

The pair then ignited the rocket motor, which propelled the craft up to 55,000 feet. During the 16-second engine burn, SpaceShipTwo went supersonic, hitting Mach 1.2. … Read more

When Spaceport America makes international news, it's often in conjunction with names like "Richard Branson," "Virgin Galactic," and "Ashton Kutcher." That celebrity shine is hard to ignore, but it's not the only thing happening at the spaceport.

Virgin Galactic has already sold 520 tickets for its suborbital space tourism flights, expected to start in late 2013. I'm standing in front of the epically named Virgin Galactic Gateway to Space. It's a massive building that blends into the New Mexico desert from one side and reflects Spaceport America's 10,000-foot runway from the other.

A uniquely New Mexico venture I'm a part owner of the spaceport that is sprouting up out of the Jornada del Muerto (remember the Trinity Site location). As a tax-paying New Mexican, some of my state dues have gone to the $209 million price tag for this facility's first two phases of construction.… Read more

The one percent may feel under siege these days, but at least there's one consolation to having hundreds of millions of dollars to burn: The opportunity to take a trip around the moon.

According to the Smithsonian magazine Air & Space, anyone with a spare $150 million laying may have the opportunity to hop aboard a future lunar flight.

To be sure, it's not going to be United Airlines ferrying the super rich to the moon. Rather, it is likely to be Space Adventures, the private company that for the last ten years has been taking mega-rich passengers on trips to the International Space Station. … Read more

SEATTLE--Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and legendary aircraft designer Burt Rutan have teamed up on a new winged rocket that would be carried aloft by a gargantuan twin-fuselage mothership and then dropped from 30,000 feet for the climb to orbit, they announced today.

The new rocket will be funded by Allen through a new company known as Stratolaunch Systems and built by Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, of Hawthorne, Calif.

The 1.2-million-pound six-engine carrier aircraft, with a wingspan of 385 feet, will be built by Scaled Composites of Mojave, Calif., a company founded by Rutan and now owned by … Read more

With the shuttle program retired, NASA is turning to Virgin Galactic to hitch rides to the edge of space.

Richard Branson's private venture, which aims to be the first commercial space carrier, said it has signed a deal to give the agency up to three charter flights on SpaceShipTwo. The contract could be worth as much as $4.5 million.

The space plane, whose assembly hangar at the Mojave Air and Space Port was unveiled last month, will carry at least one science mission with a flight test engineer to monitor experiments. … Read more

MOJAVE, Calif.--"We build spaceships."

That's the motto--perhaps the coolest ever?--of The Spaceship Company, the partnership between Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites, builder of the X-Prize-winning SpaceShip One and its younger sister ship, SpaceShip Two.

And on Monday, The Spaceship Company (TSC) formally opened what it calls FAITH, the final assembly facility for SpaceShip Two and the aircraft on which it piggybacks, WhiteKnight Two. At the celebration, Virgin Galactic showed off, for the first time at a public event, a replica of SpaceShipOne, as well as the actual WhiteKnightOne, SpaceShipTwo, and WhiteKnightTwo (… Read more

On April 28, 2001, the world of exploration changed forever.

On that day 10 years ago, Dennis Tito, a wealthy engineer who had recently turned 60, broke one of the most sacred barriers in exploration: he became the first private citizen to go to space.

Blasting off on that Saturday from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan aboard Russian rocket--Soyuz TM-32--Tito was on his way to a place only professional astronauts and military- or government-sponsored personnel had been able to go before.

Tito was the launch client for a new company called Space Adventures that was founded in 1998. Led by chairman Eric Anderson, the company set out to change one of the most fundamental dynamics of space travel and make it possible for the first time for private citizens to experience life beyond Earth.

This was not possible in the United States. NASA was not interested in taking tourists aboard the Space Shuttle--and never has been--explained Space.com senior writer Clara Moskowitz. And so those like Tito who wanted to make like an astronaut had no choice but to go the Space Adventures route--which meant traveling to Russia for weeks of training and an eventual trip aboard one of that country's Soyuz rockets. … Read more

Software industry veteran Charles Simonyi is ready to go back to outer space.

In April 2007, Simonyi spent close to two weeks in orbit, in a very expensive round trip via Russian rocket to spend time aboard the International Space Station. The trip reportedly cost Simonyi $25 million, and apparently he considers the money very well spent: Space Adventures, the company that organized the junket, announced Tuesday that he has signed up for another trip, this one coming up sometime next spring.

Space Adventures had little else to say on the matter for now, save that Simonyi would be training … Read more