Riches to Ride

He was 23 when he founded Space Adventures, which now has about 20 employees in its Tysons Corner office and a few in Russia. It also has a few salespeople in Tokyo, because the company is starting to target Asia as a good source of people who want to be space travelers.

A trip that would send tourists to the moon and back is in the works. Anderson said he is completing contracts for the passengers on the first lunar voyage, tentatively scheduled for 2011. The ticket price: $100 million.

The flight would cover about 478,000 miles round trip -- a big boost for frequent-flier accounts. That's no joke: Under a deal with American Express, Space Adventures passengers can receive points for the expeditions, just as they can with airlines. Business travelers are prime customers of Space Adventures, the company said, using mundane frequent-flier miles to pay for zero-gravity flights or simulated liftoffs and landings.

But space -- actual outer space -- remains a millionaire's playground.

"People ask when it will get down to $25,000 to take a trip to space," Anderson said. "It will never get there if we don't start out at $25 million."

So Space Adventures largely targets clients by the size of their wallets. Anderson's crew -- advised by a lineup of 10 former astronauts, including Buzz Aldrin of the first lunar landing in 1969 -- first does research to identify wealthy people who might be interested. They may have expressed interest in space travel in media interviews, written about rocket dreams in a personal blog, or given money to space-oriented ventures. People who have had other extreme adventures, such as climbing Mount Everest, are also candidates. Working from that roster, Anderson's crew organizes presentations around the world, and then recruits.

The company's first four space-tourist clients were self-made millionaires with lifelong passions for space. Dennis Tito, who in 2001 was the first to take the trip, worked at NASA before founding an investment management firm. South African Mark Shuttleworth, who sold his Internet security company to VeriSign in 1999, went up in 2002. Gregory Olsen, who founded and later sold a New Jersey infrared camera company, took the trip after retiring in 2005. Last September the tourist was Anousheh Ansari, an Iranian American telecom entrepreneur.

And Simonyi, the current orbiter? He won a contest to become his native Hungary's junior astronaut and has followed the space industry ever since. As the lead developer of Word and Excel, who reportedly came out of Microsoft with a fortune of about $1 billion, Simonyi saw the price of a space trip as merely an afterthought.

"Spaceflight is a unique, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity," Simonyi wrote in an e-mail from space. "The opportunity presented itself and I decided to take it."

Howard E. McCurdy, a professor of public administration at American University who studies international space policy, likens the Space Adventures business model to that of the early years of air travel, when only rich thrill-seekers took the ride.

"People did it as a lark, and no one thought there was any industrial potential, and now we're flying to Cancun for spring break," he said. "People will be flying to space in 50-person rockets in 50 years."

Today's billionaire space entrepreneurs "are really laying out their money, but do they have a good business plan?" McCurdy said. "I don't know, but at least it's a clever one."

Norman E. Thagard, a retired NASA astronaut and the first American to fly in a Russian spacecraft, in 1995, has helped passengers prepare for Space Adventure flights aboard Soyuz craft.

"I think there's already a market -- there are hundreds of billionaires in the world," he said. "The fact that it's space makes it more exotic, but soon it will be more routine."