Fly me to the Moon, sang Frank Sinatra and now Space Adventures turns it into reality for a mere $150 million. The company that sent several clients to the International Space Station in the 2000s now offers two tickets to fly around the Moon during an eight-day trip in a Soyuz spacecraft.

The Soyuz in itself can't leave low-Earth orbit of course, it will need and additional booster to do that. So Space Adventures plans two separate launches, one of which will lift the spacecraft with the two passengers and presumably a third professional astronaut. The second rocket will carry the Russian Block-DM booster, commonly used as third stage on Russian rockets, and an additional habitation module to maximize comfort. The two vehicles will then rendezvous in low-Earth orbit and head towards the Moon. The first launch may occur in 2015.

Space Adventures has a wide variety of offers connected to spaceflight by the way, starting from “simple” zero-g flights. They also sell tickets for the planned suborbital spacecraft of John Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace. And it seems like after organizing eight successful visits to the ISS they have a good enough reputation to have somebody who is actually willing to give a sum comparable to the GDP of the smallest countries to them. Because one of the tickets to the Moon is already sold. As for the other one, are dogs allowed for the trip, I wonder?

Image credits: Earthrise by Kaguya (C) JAXA/NHK; Soyuz concept (C) Space Adventures.

László Molnár