It's Always Climactic When it's Intergalactic

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Eric Anderson is a travel agent to the stars--the ones in outer space, that is. If you've got $30 to $40 million and a desire to live out your wildest Star Trek fantasies, he's your man. The 33-year-old entrepreneur put together all five deals in which the Russians sent a tourist to the International Space Station and brought them home safely. His firm, Space Adventures, is the "only company currently providing opportunities for actual private spaceflight and space tourism today," and has generated roughly $200 million in revenue since its inception ten years ago. The company operates with about 20 employees out of a modern office on the 10th floor of a 17-story tower in the Washington, D.C., suburb of Vienna, Va., not far from Anderson's home. It's filled with space memorabilia, including a suit used for spacewalks bought as surplus in Russia and toy light sabers. Anderson founded the company in 1997 with mentor and private-space-travel guru Peter Diamandis and adventure-travel pioneer Mike McDowell. It's privately held, with Anderson as the largest shareholder.

The firm initially offered flights aboard Russian MiG fighter jets, zero-gravity airplane flights and space-related experiences on the ground, such as VIP tours of Russian launches in Kazakhstan. It has dropped the MiG flights, but since 1999, Space Adventures has been selling trips to the Space Station aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket. Anderson isn't messing around. As of now, Space Adventures has purchased all of the commercially available seats on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft into 2009, and is trying to acquire the rest through 2011. While the fares for those trips aren't exactly affordable, Anderson has shown that a lot can change fast. For Anderson, tourism is only the beginning of space development. He believes space can eventually be commercialized, opened to more private citizens, and used to help Earth deal with dwindling resources.

Greater demand for space travel puts earthlings such as Anderson closer to realizing their Star Trek-style dreams, such as mining asteroids and colonizing the moon and eventually Mars. Anderson keeps a model of Mars in his office to remind him of the future.

"The market, entrepreneurship and investment in this industry have all accelerated," Anderson says. "A lot of interesting things will happen over the next 10 years." Ten to fifteen years from now, geeks looking to tie the knot won't have to resort to the Star Trek Experience in Vegas, but instead might actually be able to honeymoon...on the moon.

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