MILLIONAIRE MOON TOURISM

Fancy a trip around the Moon? That’s what Space Adventures is offering to anyone able to afford the multimillion-dollar price tag

Multimillionaires and billionaires can book their future flight around the Moon using Space Adventures’ imaginative use of existing spacecraft and technology. An essential cornerstone of this project are Soyuz rockets – spacecraft that were originally designed to take cosmonauts to the Moon. They didn’t achieve that goal, but in the 1960s and 1970s they were easily adapted to ferry cosmonauts and astronauts into Earth orbit and to space stations. In the decades since the demise of the Space Shuttle, the Soyuz craft has become the world’s safest spacecraft, making many trips.

Each trip to the Moon will carry two tourists, who will spend at least eight months preparing themselves for the high g-forces of lift-off and the weightlessness of space, along with training in operating the Soyuz module, collecting data and conducting experiments. They will blast off from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and dock with the ISS, where they will stay for ten days. While there, they will become acclimatised to living in space, carrying out a few observations and experiments. Meanwhile, a Proton rocket will blast off from Earth to deliver a lunar module into low-Earth orbit. This unmanned craft will consist of a living module and a Blok DM propulsion stage.

1 SOYUZ ORBITAL MODULE