KOSMOKURS SPACE TOURISM COMPANY HAS ANNOUNCED LIQUIDATION

Kosmokurs Company, the only private organization in Russia, engaged in the development of the space tourism market, will be liquidated. This was announced on April 6 by its CEO Pavel Pushkin. According to him, the reason for the liquidation of the business was the Russian bureaucracy, which hinders the design of the cosmodrome, which the company planned to build in the Nizhny Novgorod region.

The company, which until recently had about 50 employees, was founded in 2014 as a part of the Skolkovo Foundation.

The company had a significant investor whose name was not disclosed.

The founders of the organization, according to data from open sources, were Alexander Tukatsinsky (70%) and Pavel Pushkin (30%).

Over the six-year period of work, the company gained fame thanks to the optimistic plans to create a material base for sending tourists who wanted to climb 200 km from the Earth in order to have a feeling of weightlessness on a suborbital flights. The price for the impressions received was about $ 200-250 thousand.

So far, tourist excursions into space remain an expensive pleasure, inaccessible to most even very wealthy citizens. In the period from 2001 to 2009, only 8 people visited the spaceships as tourists. All of them went to space as part of the collaboration of the American company Space Adventures with Roskosmos, flying on board the Soyuz spacecraft.

The cost of the flight ranged from $ 20 to $ 50 million.

In 2021, Roskosmos has already announced plans to organize tourist flights. The similar program was planned at Space X, owned by Elon Musk. Roscosmos is going to send two people, one of whom must make an exit into the open space. Space X also announced plans to equip three tourists, who must be accompanied in flight by one professional astronaut. The Kosmokurs company, according to the statements of the management, is dropping out of this space competition.

The Kosmokurs management failed to agree on the requirements for the cosmodrome construction project. The company was also unable to obtain regulatory documents from the Russian Ministry of Defense, despite the presence of a license from Roscosmos. This means that the planned launch of a suborbital rocket in 2025 will not take place, and all employees will be laid off due to staff cuts and further liquidation of the company.