14 DAY TRIAL // Space tourism is becoming increasingly popular and some people hope it will become the next big attraction and maybe the ideal family vacation, sometime in the near future. So popular, in fact, that the ticket prices are skyrocketing.
Although many space tourism companies are bragging about how future trips will get more affordable, as many of them are trying to get a piece of the space cake, a trip to the International Space Station no longer costs $20 million, but it's now estimated at $40 million.
This phenomenon is not so much linked to the burning desire of the world's billionaires to see the Earth from outer space, but rather to the poor exchange rates for the US dollar. For now, only the Russian Soyuz space shuttle can send people to the station, but other companies are announcing their intention to do that in a few years.
Since the dollar is losing ground to the Russian ruble, the price of a space trip has increased from $25 million earlier this year to between $30 million and $40 million for trips planned in 2008 and 2009.
"It's mostly because of the fallen dollar," Eric Anderson, president and chief executive officer of Space Adventures, told The Associated Press on Wednesday. The company is handling all bookings for the Russian space agency, but the fact that the U.S. dollar currently is worth about 25 1/2 Russian rubles, compared with 32 rubles in 2002, doesn't seem to affect their selling plans.
How could it? If you're rich enough to afford paying $20 million, so that you can brag about having been in space, seeing the Earth from above, etc. I'm sure the minor detail of paying twice the initial money won't scare you.
There's a simple matter of competition here, or better yet, of lack of competition, since the Russian space agency is the only one to offer these trips, so they could raise the prices and blame it on the currency exchange rate.
As proof that the agency is doing very well, they just announced that that two more Soyuz seats have been purchased for tourists to fly in the fall of 2008 and the spring of 2009 and around twelve more are now in the process of booking flights for the ISS.
So, I bet these rising prices are affecting them less than the increasing gas prices affect the rest of us, mere mortals.