For Iranian-born entrepreneur Anousheh Ansari, the first woman to pay her own way into orbit, a weeklong adventure at the international space station is nearing its end. But for the Virginia-based company that organized her $20 million trip, Ansari's flight is only the start of a new chapter in what could be a decades-long space adventure. "This flight has taken it to the next level," said Eric Anderson, president and chief executive officer of Space Adventures.
Although Ansari is widely known as the "first woman space tourist," Anderson prefers to think of her as the first woman to become a private space explorer. After all, tourists doesn't generally go through months of training for their tours, and they don't often participate in scientific experiments during their ride.
But Anderson does think that Ansari has demonstrated to millions of people that "you don't have to be a professional, military-class astronaut or cosmonaut to aspire to fly to orbit in your lifetime." In that sense, Ansari is a standout, and her flight has "engaged the broadest audience" among the four multimillion-dollar passenger trips that Space Adventures has organized so far. (The other three involved Dennis Tito in 2001, Mark Shuttleworth in 2002 and Greg Olsen in 2005.)
"Between the e-mails and the postings and the signups for the e-mail newsletter, we've literally had tens of thousands of people who have actively reached out to Space Adventures in the past week and a half," Anderson told me today.
And the activity won't stop once Ansari is back on the ground. In fact, she and other members of her family are basically business partners with Space Adventures in a suborbital space venture that was created earlier this year. "That's moving forward," Anderson said, although there's nothing new to announce just yet.
Anderson is also turning his focus to the next private space explorer, software billionaire Charles Simonyi, who Russian space officials say will fly to the space station next March. Space Adventures isn't ready to confirm Simonyi's schedule yet, but Anderson did note that "he's passed his medical [exam], he's begun preliminary pieces of training."
Then there's the next step: giving those space tourists ... er, explorers ... the option of taking on a spacewalk for an extra $15 million. "We've got several people who are interested in that as well," Anderson said. "It probably wouldn't happen for next year, but I believe it will happen in '08 or '09."
Training for a spacewalk would require an extra couple of months, "but it really depends on what the nature of the spacewalk is," Anderson said. It may be purely aimed at letting the customer experience space from the outside, or "it is possible that there may be some simple tasks that that person could do which would be of significant benefit to the program."
An even bigger-ticket item is the $100 million package for a trip around the moon (without actually landing on lunar soil). Anderson said he was in talks with potential buyers and would let everyone know "as soon as we have a finalized contract with one of them" - perhaps by the end of this year.
Anderson makes it sound as if plenty of well-heeled adventurers are interested in spaceflight - but are there enough Soyuz seats available to accommodate them? Or, with the impending shutdown of the space shuttle fleet, will the seats available for sale dry up?
"The answer really is a little of both," Anderson said. "We're certainly just getting started, and I do believe we'll have Soyuz flights to sell in the future. But they don't grow on trees."
That's why Space Adventures is looking into alternative means for putting passengers into orbit. "We're not interested in having just a single supplier," Anderson said. However, those alternatives won't be available for at least five years, he said. (Sounds like a job for SpaceX, or Rocketplane Kistler, or perhaps even Lockheed Martin.)
Which brings us back to Anderson's vision of a decades-long space adventure.
"It's all about changing the mind-set and opening up the frontier in the long term," he said. "To have a woman, especially someone who has certainly earned her way to success in the world through her own hard work ... it's very, very rewarding to have enabled her to reach her dream to reach orbit, and inspire so many others who will one day be advocates and future customers.
"Anousheh's flight is showing kids and young people today that they are unquestionably growing up in a world where they will go to space in their lifetime if they want to," Anderson said. "That's huge."
P.S.: Ansari delivers a big "thank you, thank you, thank you" to her supporters in a video posted on her Weblog today. Followers of space politics may note that she's wearing a jumpsuit emblazoned with an American flag design - as well as the colors of the Iranian flag, which stirred such a controversy before her launch.
