Get A Window Seat Seattle Firm Booking Passengers For Rocket Voyages To The Edges Of Space

Hey, Rocket Man! Got your bags packed?

Seattle-based Zegrahm Expeditions is taking reservations for trips on a rocket-powered cruiser that would fly 62 miles above the Earth’s surface - far enough from the planet’s gravitational pull to achieve weightlessness for about two minutes.

“I’d love to go - wouldn’t you?” said Scott Fitzsimmons, vice president of the subsidiary Zegrahm Space Voyages.

The company started taking reservations Monday and so far has “at least 15” confirmed passengers making a $5,000 deposit on the $98,000 trip, Fitzsimmons said Wednesday.

Plans call for the voyages to start in 2001, when Zegrahm plans to schedule two departures a week, with six passengers along on each “seven-day space experience,” he said.

Most of those seven days would be spent in preparation and training, said program manager Chris Ostendorf. Participants will spend two days at a space institute and three days in advanced astronaut training, he said.

“The sixth day is the exciting flight day,” Ostendorf said, with the flight itself taking 2-3 hours. The rest of that day will be spent “in celebration and awards,” he said, and the seventh day is a travel day, with space veterans heading home.

The company and its partners, including the Vienna, Va.-based aerospace company Vela Technology, have come up with a design for small jet-like vehicles, powered by rockets, that will take paying passengers up above the ozone layer to where the sky turns black.

The engine that will be used is a modification of a rocket engine built by AeroAstro, which is working with Vela on the project, Fitzsimmons said. Testing of the engine is under way, and manufacture of the ships is to start next year, he said. He declined to disclose costs.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is wary of carrying civilians since the 1986 Challenger explosion that killed seven astronauts - one of them teacher Christa McAuliffe.

But there’s a burgeoning private industry - and a cash incentive. The St. Louis-based X Prize Foundation is offering a $10 million prize for the first privately financed operation that will ferry people into space.

“It’s the competition more than anything else,” Fitzsimmons said.

“Frankly, a lot of these companies are going to spend a lot more” than $10 million going after the prize, he said. Zegrahm is not among those seeking the award, said Fitzsimmons, who declined to provide specifics on the company’s space budget.

Of course, whoever is first to offer civilian space travel likely will earn a place in the history books. So Zegrahm’s not alone in going after the out-of-this-world niche of the $8 billion global adventure-travel market.

Still, the Federal Aviation Administration’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation so far has seen little in the way of applications. That office is charged with ensuring launch safety for privately owned space vehicles. Pending legislation would extend its jurisdiction over safe re-entry of reusable space vehicles, which some companies want to use to launch satellites.

For seven years, Zegrahm Expedition has focused on “soft adventure” - “taking people to remote destinations in a comfortable way,” as Fitzsimmons puts it.

For example, Zegrahm offers Antarctic trips on a 150-passenger expedition cruise ship, with landings by smaller groups - ferried in Zodiac inflatables - to view penguin rookeries and other local sights with experts who can explain the natural history they are witnessing.

Pondering the trip is Herb Kurit, who is making his fourth visit to Antarctica with Zegrahm in January with his wife, Eileen. That venture costs $12,000 per person, plus air fare to Tasmania.

Kurit, 64, has not yet confirmed his reservation for space - and his wife says if he does go, she’ll stay home.

“Life is a risk, I’ve learned that a long time ago,” said Kurit, a Southern California resident who spoke with The Seattle Times.

“We fly on 50-year-old Russian airplanes, old Russian helicopters - I mean, really, planes that nobody I know would ever go on. … We just say that’s part of the kind of travel we do. We go with the flow.”

Potential Zegrahm space passengers would work on paying their $98,000 tab and filling out paperwork while the rockets are built and tested and the company figures out where the ships would take off and land. Trajectories would be designed to minimize gravitational force on passengers.

If there’s no flight in four years, would-be rocketeers will get their money back - minus insurance costs and without interest.

Fitzsimmons and Zegrahm company president Werner Zehnder both worked for Seattle-based Society Expeditions in 1985, when that company promised space missions for ordinary people.

Deposits were returned and the company folded after the Challenger explosion.