Russia will charge about $27 million for future tourist flights
According to Dmitry Bakanov, head of Roscosmos, it will likely charge about two billion rubles, about $27 million, to fly tourists in space in the future.
The cost of a space tourist trip will be approximately 2 billion rubles, Roscosmos CEO Dmitry Bakanov said in an interview with VK Video on the sidelines of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. “It’s still an expensive project. The costs include the rocket divided by the number of participants. There must be two professionals, because they can guide it, so it’s about two billion rubles,” Bakanov noted.
The report of his remarks in Russia’s state-run press is not entirely clear as to whether this number is the price per tourist, the price for the entire flight, or Roscosmos’ cost for the flight, excluding its mark-up. Assuming it is the price for the entire flight, it is about a quarter of what Russia was charging NASA during the last few ferrying trips to ISS before SpaceX’s Dragon capsules became operational. This makes sense, since Russia was milking NASA for as much as it could get during those last flights. Future private tourists won’t have as much money as a spend-thrift government, so Roscosmos is now forced to charge a realistic price.
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Since 1993, the U.S. has subsidized the Russian space program to a fairly staggering amount.
Of course, the motivations have changed. In the 1990s, it was partly about saving the space station from congressional opposition and partly about trying to save a struggling Yeltsin regime from anti-democratic forces. By the 2010s, it was about trying to save our crew access to the station.
We’re still subsidizing them now but it’s more indirect (and less expensive): merely by keeping the station in operation. Because Russia no longer has the resources to operate a space station on its own.
Makes you wonder where the Russian space program will be in 2036, when there’s no ISS and our need for them has practically vanished.