Japanese businessman forms space tourism company

[soyuztma]

A Japanese businessman has formed "Japan Space Dream", a company thats seems to want to use TKS capsules to ferry tourists to an Almaz space hotel. Here and here are the articles.<br />Takafumi Horie certainly seems to have enough money to go through with the venture. Another dot com millionaire that goes into the space business. Lets hope all these millionaires can start a real exploration of space. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

 

[dobbins]

Let's not lose sight of the fact that a lot of those dot com millionaires got to be millionaires by raising capital for ideas that never made a profit and which left investors holding the bag when the dot com balloon busted in 2001.<br /><br />

 

[ace5]

They would be forced to re-fix some Almaz hardware (and I dont know how many Almaz of original type are still preserved) to be ready to fly.<br />Secondly, they would be able to refurbish TKS vehicles, and it seems that there is no TKS left in storage (the last one maybe the Kosmos 1686 launched without its Merkur SA in 1985);<br />Merkur can indeed carry three cosmonauts; but it has a pure-ballistic reentry profile. It is not capable of lifting reentry like Soyuz, wich could pose some danger for some tourists without very much training.<br />Cosmonaut Vladimir Dzhanibekov said once that "the greatest problem with TKS Merkur was that the descent vehicle could land anywere in a spot of 500-km diameter; It was very hard to find it after landing."