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Vacation To The Moon For $150 Million

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Lisa Winter

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1207 Vacation To The Moon For $150 Million
NASA/JPL

If you’re tired of traditional vacations like a cruise to the Bahamas or hitting up Cozumel, Mexico, there may soon be an option that is out of this world. The company Space Adventures hopes to bring tourists to a trip around the moon, starting as early as 2017. 

The seats are expected to go for $150 million each, and they’ve already sold tickets to their first two customers. However, it has not been decided if the two customers will go together or if they will decide for one to go first. Maybe an epic rock-paper-scissors-lizard-Spock showdown is in order?

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Though there are relatively few who would ever be able to afford such a journey, the trip could be worth every penny. After all, only 18 people have ever seen the moon in such an up close and personal way, and nobody has done it since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972.

After launching on a modified Soyuz rocket from Russia, the tourist and the cosmonaut pilot will make a pit stop at the International Space Station before taking a trip around the moon. It is planned that the modified rockets will be altered to make the trip more comfortable. Since the trip will be a commercial vacation and not a scientific mission, it makes sense to make the quarters as comfortable as possible. 

The trips themselves will last about 17 days, with half of that being used to go to the moon. How close are travelers expected to get? Space Adventures CEO Eric Anderson claims they hope to bring the spacecraft within 100 kilometers of the lunar surface.

Before any manned trips to the moon take place, unmanned tests will be done in order to ensure that the equipment is suited for the trip. If successful, we can only hope that others will get into the commercial space travel market to help drive down the cost. At least then people would be filling our Facebook feeds with vacation pictures we actually want to see.

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How low would the price have to go before you would take a lunar vacation?

 

[Hat tip: Irene Klotz, Discovery]


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