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RKK Energia Confirms Private Trip To the Moon

Posted by Unknown on from the where-can-i-sign-up dept.

Teancum writes "RKK Energia, the prime contractor for the Russian space program and the company who builds the Russian Soyuz spacecraft, recently confirmed negotiations are underway with space tourism company Space Adventures for a privately financed crewed flight around the Moon. While the offer and purchase of at least one seat has been discussed earlier, this is the first time Energia has confirmed the negotiations and has gone into at least some details in terms of what they are expecting to have happen with this flight and the approximate timeframe for when this flight would take place: sometime in 2016 or 2017."

17 of 92 comments (clear)

  1. In Soviet Russia... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    In Soviet Russia, rocket launches YOU!

  2. 150 million per ticket? by Ogi_UnixNut · · Score: 2

    I am sometimes totally amazed at how much money an individual can have. I can't fathom 150 million USD, let alone be able to pay that much on a tourist trip (no matter how awesome this is). Whoever the two individuals are, they are some lucky b******s!

    If this works out, I can hope that the price will go down in time so I can make this trip one day :)

    1. Re:150 million per ticket? by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Funny

      Just wait until you hear what the ticket back from inevitable(if undoubtedly historic) death on the hostile airless rock costs... That is where they really get you.

    2. Re:150 million per ticket? by elsurexiste · · Score: 2

      If this works out, I can hope that the price will go down in time so I can make this trip one day :)

      You should read "The Rocket", a short story by Ray Bradbury. It's about the same thing!

      --
      I rarely respond to comments. Also, don't ask for clarifications: a brain and Google are faster, believe me!
    3. Re:150 million per ticket? by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 2

      Yeah, luck. Luck is totally the only way anyone ever becomes rich. All of them are lottery winners, or something.

      It really depends on what you mean by "luck". I couldn't find any good numbers for those just able to take a $150 million vacation('millionaires' includes far too many people a factor of ten or two too poor, while 'billionaires' excludes those in the 151-999 million range who could afford it if they wanted it enough. '150 millionaires' just isn't a very charismatic cut-off category...); but the 2011 Forbes list of billionaires was only 1,210 names long. With a world population around the 6.8 billion mark, that makes billionairehood a very low-probability condition(~1.8x10^-7).

      The question, then, is whether you wish to define 'luck' in the fairly broad sense of "possessing a desirable and statistically improbable outcome", or whether you wish to assert that there is a usefully broad swath of things(not themselves allocated by chance) that an individual can use to skew his outcome(and whose likelihood of doing so isn't simply a matter of chance)...

    4. Re:150 million per ticket? by rickb928 · · Score: 2

      Google much?

      --
      deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
    5. Re:150 million per ticket? by S.O.B. · · Score: 2

      The only humans deaths in orbit were the crew of Soyuz 11 who died when their capsule decompressed after it separated from Salyut 1.

      --
      Some of what I say is fact, some is conjecture, the rest I'm just blowing out my ass...you guess.
    6. Re:150 million per ticket? by causality · · Score: 2

      He was lucky to have rich parents who floated him the capital he needed for his company, and connected parents who helped him get a contract with IBM.

      As little children everywhere begin to discover, life is inherently unfair. I remember when I was a small child and started to notice this. I didn't like it much myself.

      The question is whether they stay childish into their adult years or if they come to accept this and do the best they can with the hand they are dealt. That means trying to better your lot in life. That means being responsible for what you can control. Sometimes it means tightening your belt and saying "no" to some petty indulgence (or one not-so-petty for which you are not yet ready) so you can work towards a larger, more fulfilling goal -- what is called delayed gratification.

      Maybe you wanted to have multiple children at the ripe old age of 19 instead of first getting an education and establishing a career and a stable two-parent household. Okay, you have that freedom. You can have what you want right now. But don't complain if you don't have the easy life you dreamed of. That's just one unusually common example of what is so often called "bad luck" and absolutely isn't. There's no way you didn't know what birth control was, be it rubbers or one of the dozen or so forms of non-surgical birth control methods available to women.

      One sure sign of childishness is when you think it's the job of government or anyone else who can use force/coercion to try to force your particular brand of "fairness" on everyone else with no concern for whether they welcome it. No amount of hardship ever made me feel like I had the right to demand anything from anyone else. And naturally government's brand of "fairness" is to take someone else down a peg or two, it is seldom if ever about uplifting someone else so they can develop a marketable trade, business acumen, financial savvy, or other skills it takes to succeed on your own with no further help from anyone.

      Government's brand of "fairness" is always about encouraging dependency and a deep sense of being cheated. It is a means to achieve political power by always being needed. The people who vote for this think they are being served. They think they are evening a score or spreading the wealth but this is false. They're being used like the useful iditos they are. Always the illusion is that you are being served or helped but the politicians are only helping themselves to you. We've been doing things this "progressive" way for a long time now and the wealth disparity between rich and poor has only become worse. Only an insane fool keeps trying the same thing over and over again despite all evidence that it isn't working, that it fails to achieve the desired result.

      I'm not completely sure what any kind of "ultimate solution" would be, but I do know we will never even get a partially constructive solution if we are not willing to abandon failed ideas that have been given plenty of chances and have failed each time. Trying harder and harder to implement a failed idea just leads to more failure. I know why the politicians don't want to admit that. Until they finally do bankrupt the country, it works very much in their favor. What I don't understand is why so many ordinary citizens don't want to even consider the idea long enough to see if it might be valid.

      --
      It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
  3. Please take some good photos of Apollo remains. by master_p · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Please, when you go around the moon, take some time to get some good photos of the Apollo missions remains. When I say "good photos", I mean photos that show stuff almost as good as they are shown on NASA's videos from the moon.

    It would shut the Apollo conspiracy advocators up for good, and close this silly subject.

    1. Re:Please take some good photos of Apollo remains. by PopeRatzo · · Score: 5, Funny

      Please, when you go around the moon, take some time to get some good photos of the Apollo missions remains.

      I want photos of the military bases on the dark side.

      The alien ones.

      It would shut the Apollo conspiracy advocators up for good, and close this silly subject.

      I don't think you quite understand how conspiracy theories work.

      --
      You are welcome on my lawn.
    2. Re:Please take some good photos of Apollo remains. by caturday · · Score: 2

      Oh come on. You know better than that. Then it'd be "But NASA *paid* you to claim that these were your photos.

      Hell, even if they went themselves, they'd claim that it was mirrors dropped by previous unmanned trips. Or swamp gas. Or they never left Earth at all and were in some kind of simulator. Though I suppose there's an easy way to fix that last one: offer to open the airlock.

    3. Re:Please take some good photos of Apollo remains. by Chris+Mattern · · Score: 2

      It would shut the Apollo conspiracy advocators up for good, and close this silly subject.

      You are far too optimistic. The conspiracy theorists would promptly come up with convincing reasons (well, convincing to them, anyways) as to why the RKK Energia flight was *also* fake, and the photos are obvious fakes.

  4. Sounds like the 1979 Iran mission, repeated by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This won't be easy. The big russian rocket, the Proton has way too toxic fluoric propellant to be allowed for man-rated flight. The smaller Soyuz (the R7 family) is too weak to do the lifting as a single launch. There will be two or three near-simultaneous launches, maybe 1 unmanned Proton and 1 manned Soyuz, or 2 unmanned Soyuz (Zond) and 1 manned Soyuz to bring all the hardware to LEO, where there will be a need for spacewalks to assemble the big round-the-Moon rocket.

    That project will be about as complicated and reliable as the 1979 US mission to save hostages from Iran. Over-complicated plans have a high chance of failure. Maybe it would be simpler to adopt the large, but less toxic Ariane-5 missile for manned launch and that could possible do the whole Moon round-trip in one launch.

    1. Re:Sounds like the 1979 Iran mission, repeated by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 2

      I ask purely out of curiosity: Given that manned rocketry basically consists of getting the engineers to keep hammering away at the problem until "Place self on top of giant cylinder of extraordinarily volatile propellant. Ignite." goes from being sheer insanity to being merely risky, why would the fact that the propellant is toxic, as well as highly volatile, be an obstacle to using it to lift humans?

      Fluorine compounds are certainly a pretty horrid lot; but if propellant is making its way into the payload in any quantity you are already pretty screwed, no?

  5. Re: Photos of landing site from Earth? by QuasiSteve · · Score: 2

    The Apollo conspiracy theorists don't even acknowledge the pictures of the stuff the various Apollo crews left on the moon taken by just about everyone with the necessary equipment here on Earth

    Correct me if I'm wrong - but wouldn't they have good reason to be skeptical of such claims?

    I don't remember any photos of the moon landing site as taken from Earth. In fact, it was my understanding that resolving power of just about any optical system in existence on Earth is inadequate?

    I know photos were taken from an orbiting satellite a few years ago, the LRO. Even in those pictures the landing site is a mere few pixels;
    http://www.space.com/6997-photos-reveal-apollo-11-moon-landing-site.html

  6. Trip AROUND the moon, not TO the moon by Fished · · Score: 4, Informative

    Note that they are apparently just orbiting the moon, not landing. May seem like a "minor detail", but the engineering problems are of an entirely different magnitude.

    --
    "He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
  7. Re:There's gold in them thar hills. by Ost99 · · Score: 2

    The energy cost of going from the Earth to the Moon is enormous, going the other way is much cheaper.
    Current railgun technology would be capable of launching objects from the Moon to the Earth at ridiculous low cost (solar powered ~3kWh /kg).
    A solar farm of 1 square km should be sufficient to launch 1000 metric tons of material from the Moon each day.

    --
    ---- Sig. gone.