Washington (AFP)

The American space company SpaceX announced Monday a partnership to send up to four private customers in space, but the price of the ticket is not known.

SpaceX has signed an agreement with the company Space Adventures, based near Washington and which has served as an intermediary to send eight space tourists to the International Space Station (ISS) via the Russian space agency and the Soyuz rockets. The first of these tourists was Dennis Tito in 2001, who paid $ 20 million for an eight-day stay at the ISS. The most recent was the founder of Cirque du Soleil, Guy Laliberté, in 2009.

SpaceX will take them on board its Crew Dragon capsule, which it developed to transport NASA astronauts and which should make its first manned flight in a few months, on a date not yet fixed.

Private flights will not include a stay in the ISS, according to the SpaceX press release.

"This historic mission will pave the way for spaceflight for everyone who dreams of it," said Gwynne Shotwell, president of SpaceX, a company founded by billionaire Elon Musk.

The date, duration and program of the mission were not specified, but Eric Adventures, president of Space Adventures, indicated that the flight would make it possible "to reach twice the altitude of the preceding missions of civil astronaut or from the space station ". The ISS flies at around 400 km altitude.

In space tourism, the companies Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin are developing vessels capable of sending just above the border of space, much lower (80 or 100 km depending on the definitions chosen respectively by each company), for a few minutes, private passengers, for 250,000 dollars or more in the case of Virgin.

What SpaceX offers with Crew Dragon is a much more expensive mission, tens of millions of dollars without doubt, at hundreds of km of altitude, launched by a Falcon 9 rocket, the same one which sends sateltites and will send astronauts to the ISS.

At the same time, Boeing is also developing for NASA an orbital capsule, Starliner, to join the ISS. Starliner may also be able to fly private passengers in the future, but its development is hampered by major software problems that almost caused its loss during an unmanned test mission in December.

© 2020 AFP