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Eric Anderson is CEO of the ultimate high-end travel agency. In 2001, Space Adventures was the first company to successfully send a tourist to the International Space Station. After a repeat performance in 2002, Anderson set his sights a little higher. Last Wednesday he announced $100 million package tours to the dark side of the moon. After six to eight weeks of training, explorers with the means will get up to 21 days aboard Russian Soyuz capsules, performing engineering experiments, taking detailed photographs and, eventually, according to Anderson, putting space exploration within the reach of every human being. He spoke to NEWSWEEK's Yepoka Yeebo. Excerpts:
YEEBO: When will trips to the moon be within reach?
ANDERSON: It certainly will be accessible to those other than the superrich, but not unless the superrich pay for the beginning of it, just like the superrich paid for the first supercomputers. When will moon trips be $100,000? I don't know, but they'll never be $100,000 if they don't start at $100 million. It's the early adopters who pay for the technology, for the engineering, for the paradigm shift that enables the rest of us to experience it later. Our goal is to provide as many different space experiences to as many different people as possible.
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Is this just an extreme holiday?
"Holiday" is not really the right word; it's really an expedition. This is something philanthropic; it is going to inspire the rest of us to continue exploring, it's going to inspire students to study science and math, it's going to inspire companies to make new types of technology. This mission is about much more than just a joyride.
Are early adopters paying? What's the investment climate like for space travel?
Right now it's primarily billionaires who invest money into space travel; we don't have any space-travel venture-capital firms or any space-travel investment banks, and we probably won't until there's a really big, successful company that goes out and makes a new kind of [cheaper, safer] rocket.
Is this the realm of private companies? Where is government's place in this?
Looking for life in the universe, studying advanced technologies that can take us to Mars. It doesn't conflict with what private companies do. Throughout history, private companies have opened frontiers right alongside governments. NASA has very ambitious plans, and they need to develop a new type of rocket to be able to implement them. One of the benefits NASA would enjoy is by having a private company demonstrate the Soyuz. NASA could then buy [our] services if it needed them, or otherwise utilize [our] translunar transportation systems to achieve its own goals.
You announced the moon mission the day after Discovery got back; will the grounding of NASA's shuttle fleet affect the way you work?
Space travel is a form of exploration. We're still in the early days of spaceflight; there've only been 440 people who've ever been in space. There are risks associated with spaceflight, just like there are with any type of exploration. And the risks are worth it. People who chose to participate in these programs are explorers, so they accept the risks. Having said that, it is our responsibility and the responsibility of those who build the rockets to make them as safe as possible. And the Soyuz is a very safe rocket. It's very mature--we haven't had an accident in over 30 years. As a system, it's simple: it has an escape system such that the crew can get out if there's a problem and come back to Earth at every phase of the flight. So as far as spacecraft go, it is the best. The shuttle is not a feasible commercial vehicle. It's too expensive and too dangerous.
Would you say Space Adventures has a mission? Why are you doing this?
Space tourism is a catalyst. It's a near-term market; we can service it now, from $100,000 suborbital flights to $100 million circumlunar flights, and we can reinvest our profits into building better and better transportation systems, and those same transportation systems 50 to 100 years from now will enable us to open up, to develop space.
The space frontier is critical for humanity. There are too many benefits to be counted--energy, for example. There's enough renewable, clean energy from the sun to satisfy our energy needs, but it's too expensive to put solar-power satellites into orbit. The only way is if we build cheaper and safer rockets, and the only reason to build them is because people on this planet want to fly themselves.
How is this critical for humanity?
Everything that we have of value on Earth, that we fight wars over, is available in infinite quantities there. There's enough precious metals in one half-mile asteroid to be worth a trillion dollars in the world market. And we wouldn't have to go dig up our mountains and our national parks to try to strip-mine away what we have here. Maybe it's hundreds of years from now, but if we don't start with things like this, it'll never happen.
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