Background
Eric C. Anderson is the president and CEO of Space Adventures. He co-founded the company in 1998 with several other entrepreneurs from the aerospace, adventure travel and entertainment industries. The company is headquartered in Tysons Corner, Virginia with an office in Moscow.
Space Adventures offers a variety of programs such as Orbital spaceflight missions to the International Space Station, Circumlunar missions around the moon, zero gravity flights, cosmonaut training programs, spaceflight qualification programs, and reservations on future suborbital spacecrafts.
Since 2001, Space Adventures has launched seven clients on eight successful missions to the International Space Station (ISS). In April 2001, the company sent American businessman Dennis Tito for a reported $20 million payment, making him the first space tourist. South African businessman Mark Shuttleworth did the same in April 2002, becoming the first African in space. Gregory Olsen became the third private citizen to travel to the ISS in October 2005, followed by the first female space tourist, Anousheh Ansari, who completed her 10-day orbital mission in September 2006. Charles Simonyi, an ex-executive at Microsoft, became the fifth space tourist who visited the ISS in April 2007, then again in March 2009. He is the world’s first private space explorer who launched to space twice. In 2008, game developer Richard Garriott, the first second-generation U.S. astronaut, became the sixth client to travel to the ISS. In October 2009, Cirque du Soleil founder, Guy Laliberté, became the first Canadian space tourist to have launched to space.
In January 2008, Space Adventures acquired Zero Gravity Corporation which is the first and only FAA-approved provider of weightless flights to the general public.
The company's advisory board includes Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin, Space Shuttle astronauts Sam Durrance, Tom Jones, Byron Lichtenberg, Norm Thagard, Kathy Thornton, Pierre Thuot, and Charles Walker, Skylab/Shuttle astronaut Owen Garriott, and Russian cosmonaut Yuri Usachev.
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