Indian American Entrepreneur to Sell Space Tourism
FYI,
"Indian American Entrepreneur to Sell Space Tourism"
WebIndia123.com
http://news.webindia123.com/news/showdetails.asp?id=81809&cat=Business
: Chirinjeev Kathuria, the irrepressible Indian American serial
: entrepreneur from Chicago, is returning to his first love
: - commercial space travel.
: Kathuria, who some years ago, co-founded MirCorps, a Russian
: partnered company that sent American businessman Dennis Tito to
: space April 4, 2000, is partnering with Canadian Arrow to form a
: new Canadian corporation called PLANETSPACE.
: Canadian Arrow was founded by Geoffrey Sheerin, originally to
: compete for the $10 million Ansari X PRIZE to build a successful
: space vehicle commercially, and has been moving toward building a
: spacecraft that will take passengers into sub-orbital flight.
: "We are interested in making this a profitable business. I am more
: interested in getting applause form Wall Street rather than from
: jet propulsion labs," said Kathuria who could not become an
: astronaut as a teenager because he wore glasses.
: "The fact is I've always wanted to make commercial space travel a
: reality for the everyday person, and to create a business to make a
: company profitable.
: "PlanetSpace is going to be doing that and to create a whole new
: industry based on space tourism. We are going to focus on making
: products in space, for instance, pharmaceutical drugs that we can
: make 10 times cheaper in zero gravity. We will also look at
: satellite repair, waste disposal."
: Sheerin, who met Kathuria through a financing search company, says
: the two think alike on making this a commercially viable
: enterprise.
: "We had both been working separately on the same thing," Sheerin
: told IANS. "The main thing is that we made a business decision to
: do it on a rocket that was already built - the V2 - these cost
: hundreds of millions of dollars to build, so we won't have to do
: that," said Sheerin whose company modified the V2 for commercial
: travel.
: He said his company test ran the modified V2 at 45,000 pounds of
: thrust, the amount needed for lift-off to leave the launch pad and
: fly off into space.
: "We've rebuilt this original engine and have it working very well,"
: he emphasised. "That engine-test is incredibly important. From the
: Canadian standpoint, it is the largest liquid-propellant engine
: ever built and most countries cannot build an engine of that
: thrust."
: Kathuria has in the past tried to get an edge by being first at the
: starting line. He founded XTreme, a free ISP, in Britain. Later, he
: was involved in a cell-phone venture in India.
: "Space is now the only untapped frontier," Kathuria said. "The
: Wright Brothers pioneered air travel barely a hundred years ago,
: and it's very real that space travel is going to be a norm very
: quickly," he contended.
: "When I was graduating from business school 10 years ago, we hardly
: used the Internet and now from the car we can send faxes and have
: Blackberries."
: Sheerin and Kathuria, along with the test pilot astronauts who will
: fly Canadian Arrow on its first manned missions will be holding
: news conferences in the coming days to announce details of the
: company's plans along with the unveiling of the Canadian Arrow
: rocket with its new PLANETSPACE identity.
--
Mark Reiff <markreiff@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
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