Such flights cost around 280 thousand rubles. Carried out at the Chkalovsky airfield in the Moscow region. They are available to everyone who does not have contraindications for health reasons and age restrictions. Flights in zero gravity, of course, are not real cosmotourism, which today is gaining momentum around the world. But the impressions received on board the IL-76 MKD are remembered for a long time.

He prepared for flight for 8 months, underwent serious physical training and even mastered the basics of spacecraft control, up to its manual docking with the ISS in case of an emergency. Commercial flights to the ISS on Soyuz ships were carried out from 2001 to 2009. Their organizers were Roscosmos and the American company Space Adventures. Training for tourists and training for weightlessness took place in the Star City near Moscow and took an average of 6 to 9 months. In total, 8 tourist flights were carried out, and the cost of the most expensive ticket was $35 million.

For Dennis Tito, South African businessman Mark Shuttleworth, American millionaires Gregory Olsen and Richard Garriot, as well as the owner of the Circus du Soleil Guy Laliberte, went to conquer space. The first space tourist in 2006 was Anouche Ansari, whom Russian cosmonauts affectionately called Anyusha. And Charles Simoni, one of the founders of Microsoft, visited orbit twice – in 2007 and 2009.

The leaders among space “tour operators” along with Space Adventures are Blue Origin companies Jeff Basos and Virgin Galactic Richard Branson. The latter are distinguished by the simplicity of approach to the issue – instead of exhausting training and a difficult path to the ISS, they develop commercial suborbital tours up to 100 km from the surface of the earth and offer customers a kind of “dive into space.” Two and a half hours of flight with the fastest possible preparation and in fairly comfortable conditions give rainbow prospects for space tourism. Already, tickets for “space transfers” from Virgin Galactic are sold out several years in advance, and among those who have already booked a tour into space are Hollywood actors Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hanks and Angelina Jolie.

Travel up to 100 km from the earth’s surface is offered by Virgin Galactic British billionaire Richard Branson and Blue Origin American Jeff Bezos. The cost of a suborbital tour is 450 thousand dollars. Another player in the space tour operator market – the American concern Boeing – is developing an unmanned passenger capsule Starliner, its test flight will take place in 2022.

Plans to send tourists into orbit also Elon Musk’s SpaceX. At the same time, the world-famous billionaire, engineer and inventor, who was awarded the membership of the Royal Society of London for his services to science, plans not to limit himself to creating a “space taxi.”

On May 30, 2020, SpaceX successfully launched two NASA astronauts into orbit for the first time in history on the private spacecraft Crew Dragon. Now the company Ilona Mask is preparing for the orbital flight of the reusable transport system Starship – by far the largest rocket in the world. The system may enter orbit in January 2022. This will happen if SpaceX has time to complete the construction of an appropriate launch pad in Texas.

Space Adventures, the first space tour operator in history, is also going to resume tourist flights on Russian ships. In May 2021, the company announced the start of preparations for the flight to the ISS, Yusaku Maezawa and his assistant Jozo Hirano on the Soyuz MS-20 ship. The flight is scheduled for December 2021. Pre-flight training takes place at the Cosmonaut Training Center named after Yu.A. Gagarin. In addition, Space Adventures is negotiating with potential space tourists who are ready to fly to the ISS on Soyuz and go into outer space.

It is planned to place tourists on the ISS. It is too early to talk about comfort and luxury services, although many companies have been working on the concept of space hotels for more than 50 years. One of the first to present his project was Barron Hilton back in 1967. Given the successes achieved by modern space conquerors, flights to the moon, walks in outer space and weekends in an orbital hotel no longer seem like an impossible dream.