Consortium to make tour vehicles for space
Think of it as a motorized cable car to the stratosphere.
Space Adventures, the company that has sent tourists into space on
Russian rockets, is teaming up with Prodea, an investment firm
founded by the Ansari family, to develop a fleet of suborbital,
reusable spacecraft for space tourism. The Federal Space Agency of
the Russian Federation will also participate, by supervising the
development of the vehicles.
"Our goal in supporting the X Prize was to launch a new space
industry through the introduction of commercial suborbital
spaceflights," Anousheh Ansari, co-founder of Prodea, said in a
statement. "We partnered with Space Adventures because they have
proved that there is a market for space tourism by having been the
first company to fly a private citizen to space, and remain today
the only company to have actually taken tourists to space," she
said. The Ansari family created the X Prize, which awarded $10
million to the SpaceShipOne team for successfully creating a
private spacecraft.