First Commercial Space Tourism Company

uberdave writes "The Canadian Arrow team (one of the contenders for the Ansari X-Prize) has joined forces with Dr. Chirinjeev Kathuria, a leading American entrepreneur, to form a new corporation called Planetspace. The goal of the company is to make space flight available to the public within 24 months. Geoff Sheerin, President of Canadian Arrow, says that Planetspace has entered final discussions with partners who will establish a reality television show set in space, and with a company to hold an international lottery with space flight prizes. Planetspace expects to fly almost 2,000 new astronauts in the first five years of flying. Fares will start at USD $250,000 for a suborbital flight, including fourteen days training."

Comments

Re:Whatabout?

[AnObfuscator]

Well, Virgin Galactic may be the first company *founded*, but this will be the first one to *operate*, if all goes as planned.

Re:Richard Branson

[taskforce]

Actually no, he's sold the various different areas of the company off bit by bit and they are no longer owned by him or related at all except for branding.

Re:What about Virgin?

[oniony]

Virgin Galactic was founded sometime last year.

http://www.virgingalactic.com/en/

Re:Total cost of space flight

[Rei]

There are two possibilities:

1) You define "space flight" in relation to what they're currently doing. I.e., suborbital "couple minutes on an unscalable aerial rocketsled" as opposed to real space flight. There's no space junk, because if the craft isn't going to orbit, neither is the junk.

2) You define "space flight" the way it has historically been viewed, as LEO or higher. No companies are offering this at this point, and won't be until costs can go way down.

Craft like Canadian Arrow and SpaceShipOne, as they aren't built like real, scalable spacecraft, won't do much to lower costs; however, craft like the Falcon (if they can pull it off... here's to hoping!) will. The concept of an American rocket launching payloads far cheaper than not only other US rockets, but Russian, Chinese, and even Indian rockets, is pretty darn impressive if they can achieve it. Of course, I won't get my hopes up just yet - companies like SpaceX have a pretty high failure rate.

Re:What about Virgin?

[DerekLyons]

This may be interesting, but these guys are definately not the first.

Virgin Galactic was founded sometime last year.

And MirCorp (who organized Tito's flight) sometime quite before that.

Re:not extensible

[uberdave]

They've done engine tests, and capsule recovery tests, and they've got plenty of signs of flight hardware. It was recently touring Chicago. These are not photoshopped pictures. The rocket is a real thing. I've seen it.

timothy is an idiot moderator

[Anonymous Coward]

This about the fourth commercial space company.