Photo: Fernando Gregory/123rf

Space Adventures announced that it will offer an orbital cruise on board the SpaceX Dragon, the same craft that will shortly take astronauts to and from the International Space Station (ISS).

Up to four adventurous and well-heeled people will be rocketed into space in an orbit that will be farther away from Earth than any human has flown since the Apollo 17 mission, two to three times higher than the ISS.

Space Adventures expects the flight to take place somewhere between late 2021 and mid-2022. After a few weeks of astronaut training in the United States, the four passengers will take off for a five-day flight of a lifetime.

The world has been waiting for the space tourism industry to take off for over 15 years, ever since SpaceShipOne won the Ansari XPrize in October 2004.

The suborbital jaunts that would be offered by Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin have always been a little while in the future.

Source: The Hill