Space Adventures Offers Extra Seat on Trip around the Moon

Space Adventures has announced that it is making an additional seat available for space tourists on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft that will orbit the Moon, increasing the number of seats for tourists from one to two.

While the first seat has already been purchased, the second is still vacant.

Space Adventures, a private space tourism company, made the announcement on May 12, 2011, during a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of manned spaceflight by NASA and the tenth anniversary of the first space tourist's trip to the International Space Station.

Businessman Dennis Tito became the world's first space tourist when he joined a Soyuz mission to the ISS on April 28, 2001.

The Space Adventures flight will being with Soyuz carrying tourists to the ISS, where they will then remain for ten days. They will then return to the Soyuz, where they will spend three and a half days as the spacecraft slingshots around the Moon.  Soyuz will then take another three and a half days to return to Earth.

Space Adventures has already taken seven space tourists on eight trips to the International Space Station.

It expects its first circumlunar flight to take place in 2015.

Automaker Peugeot is sponsoring a contest in which players can win entries to a lottery, in which the grand prize is a spaceflight with Space Adventures, by searching for images of Peugeots hidden in a panoramic display of London.