Meet Eric Anderson, Space Tourism Middleman

Travel Blog  •  Joanna Kakissis  •  10.15.07 | 9:43 AM ET

imageIf you have an extra $30 million or so, you can buy a ticket on a Russian spacecraft and sing among the stars. And the man best suited for making your space travel dreams come true? A 33-year-old Northern Virginia-based entrepreneur named Eric Anderson, who has already sold five such trips to business moguls and has been credited with revitalizing the interest in private space vacations, according to a recent profile in USA Today.

Space Adventures, Anderson’s decade-old company, sells 10-day trips to the International Space Station aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket. Anderson, a Star Trek devotee who once dreamed of being the first person on Mars, said everybody had written him off as a nutball when he started the venture. But Space Adventures ended up being profitable in three years and now has 20 employees who work out of a modern office on the 10th floor of a 17-story tower in the Washington D.C. suburb of Vienna, Va. (The office even has toy light sabers.)

His wife, Inessa, said her husband has shown how to make a crazy idea work. “He’ll be the one laughing in the end,” she told reporter Barbara De Lollis.

Photo of the International Space Station by NASA.

Related on World Hum:
* Win a Trip to Space. Maybe.
* Singapore, United Arab Emirates Jump Into Space Tourism Race
* Neil Armstrong and the Promise of Space Travel

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Joanna Kakissis's writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post, among other publications. A contributor to the World Hum blog, she's currently a Ted Scripps fellow in environmental journalism at the University of Colorado in Boulder.


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