Company starts selling tickets to the moon, only $155M round trip

If your childhood dreams of becoming an astronaut and traveling to the moon have been left unfulfilled, a British company has your back. They plan to start flying round trip journeys to the moon starting in just three years. The cost? Just $155 million per person.

Excalibur Almaz was founded by a Houston patent attorney named Art Dula, but they are based on the Isle Of Man which sits in the Irish Sea between England and Northern Ireland. The island is a semi-autonomous state that writes its own laws, and I expect this played a role in Excalibur Almaz deciding to set up shop there.

To get their operation off the ground so fast, the company is relying on old Soviet era Soyuz rockets and space capsules. Two small space stations, or modules, will be set up in orbit around the moon, and the three person spacecraft will dock with them during the trip. No visits to the moon's surface are included, but you will be out there for a whopping six months.

This all sounds a whole lot more ambitious than the plans from those other space tourism companies, but I wonder where the customers will come from? You would have to be rich enough to have $155 million to blow, not too busy to take six month off from work, and crazy enough to jump in a 25 year old Soviet rocket for the trip.

Excalibur Almaz already has a bunch of the Soviet space hardware sitting at their Isle Of Man base, now all they need is some crazy rich customers. Any takers?

Excalibur Almaz, via Huffington Post

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