The European Aeronautic Defence and Space (EADS) company and its subsidiary, Astrium, have at the Paris Air Show unveiled a model of a jet designed to take tourists into space. The space jet would be big enough to take four paying passenger in a trip that would last 90 minutes, including 3 minutes of weightlessness at an altitude of more than 100 kilometers.

The company disclosed that the development work on its first aircraft is expected to begin next year and the company said it expects to have a tourist space jet up and running by 2012.

The Astrium design would take off and land like a conventional jet plane. However, at an altitude of 12 km, rockets would kick in and take take the jet to a height of 60 km in about 90 seconds. The engines would then shut down, and the jet would coast to a height of more than 100 km.

Once in space, the jet would be controled using thruster rockets. Once back in the Earth’s atmosphere, the jet engines would be used for landing. The round trip into space and back would last about 90 minutes.

EADS is betting that by the year 2020 space tourism will be a big business.

“We think there is a market for this, people are willing to pay,” Astrium’s designer for the project, Jerome Bertrand told the Globeandmail.

“We are offering a profitable system and have given ourselves until early 2008 to find industrial partners to share the risk, private investment of around €1 billion and an operator for the journey. We will not do it without that,” Francois Auque, president of EADS Astrium told space.newscientist.com.

Tickets are expected to be around US$199,000-$265,000 (euro148,000-euro197,000). At this price, the fare seems to be relatively affordable compared to the $25 million that it costs to travel into space on a Russian Soyuz rocket.

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Entry was posted on Sunday, June 24th, 2007 at 10:48 pm under Technology.

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