One of the Google’s co-founder, Sergey Brin, has allegedly
booked a flight to the International Space Station. Brin will buy one of the
two available seats on Space Adventures’ 2011 flight.
According to The
New York Times, which broke the news in advance, Sergey Brin will make an
official announcement on Wednesday.
The tourist space flights are operated by the Russian space
agency together with US-based company Space Adventures and a price of a flight
to the International Space Station aboard a Soyuz spacecraft is now somewhere
around $30 million. Sergey Brin already
made an investment of $5million into the company that will serve as a deposit
on his future flight.
Until now there have been only five space tourists. The last
space tourist was Charles Simonyi, 58, a Hungarian-American billionaire who
flew to the ISS earlier this year. His predecessors are Denis Tito (2001) and
Gregory Olsen (2005), both of the United States; Mark Shuttleworth of South
Africa (2002) and the world's first female space tourist Anousheh Ansari, a
U.S. citizen of Iranian origin, who flew to the ISS in 2006.
Space Adventures offers a variety of programs such as the
availability for spaceflight missions to the International Space Station and
around the moon, Zero-Gravity flights, cosmonaut training, spaceflight
qualification programs and reservations on future suborbital spacecrafts.
The company's advisory board includes Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin, Shuttle
astronauts Sam Durrance, Tom Jones, Byron Lichtenberg, Norm Thagard, Kathy
Thornton, Pierre Thuot, Charles Walker, Skylab/Shuttle astronaut Owen Garriott
and Russian cosmonaut Yuri Usachev.
This year it seems like Vladimir Gruzdev, a Russian
politician and businessman, will made his trip to the ISS. Gruzdev is
well-known for his appetite for extreme adventures and he took part in the
Russian expedition Arktika 2007.
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