RKK Energia Confirms Private Trip To the Moon

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."

Comments

In Soviet Russia...

[Anonymous Coward]

In Soviet Russia, rocket launches YOU!

Re:150 million per ticket?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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.

Please take some good photos of Apollo remains.

[master_p]

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.

Re:Please take some good photos of Apollo remains.

[PopeRatzo]

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.

Sounds like the 1979 Iran mission, repeated

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Trip AROUND the moon, not TO the moon

[Fished]

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.