Moscow. February 26. INTERFAX - Glavkosmos expects that the demand for space tourism services will continue, work on the manufacture of rockets for tourists continues, the head of the company Dmitry Loskutov said.
"The current geopolitical situation, of course, does not contribute to the intensification of interest in space tourism in general. We continue to work with potential clients, or rather with their representatives. Currently, in any case, a material part in the form of a Soyuz launch vehicle is being manufactured by order of Glavkosmos," Loskutov said on the Komsomolskaya Pravda radio station.
According to him, the rocket will be ready no earlier than the end of 2023, so "there is still time" to find customers.
"The world is not limited to those countries that have announced so-called sanctions. We continue to interact with the countries of Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. And work is also continuing with European partners," Loskutov added.
On December 16, 2021, the press service of Roscosmos reported that the head of the state corporation Dmitry Rogozin instructed the Rocket and Space Corporation Energia to develop and submit a plan to increase the production of manned Soyuz spacecraft to four per year in order to develop space tourism.
The press service of the state corporation reported that in recent years RSC Energia has produced four Soyuz MS spacecraft per year: two under the Federal Space Program and two under international contracts for the delivery of foreign astronauts to the ISS.
In November 2019, the head of Roscosmos announced that the state corporation had ordered the production of two additional Soyuz rockets for commercial launches from RSC Energia. It was reported that the "tourist" version of the ship will be redesigned to be controlled by one person.
In December 2019, it became known that the cost of the Soyuz-MS spacecraft flight for space tourists would amount to 2.5 billion rubles. This amount was mentioned in the documentation of the developer of the ship - RSC Energia.
Russia is a pioneer of space tourism. In the period from 2001 to 2021, nine commercial flight participants went into orbit on Soyuz spacecraft, one of them twice. Roscosmos and Space Adventure have been cooperating in the field of space tourism since 2001, when the first space tourist Denis Tito flew into orbit.
