Engineering students to host talk on the future of space exploration

Eric Anderson, the president and chief executive officer of Space Adventures Ltd. will speak about the future of space exploration at Virginia Tech on Wednesday, March 19 at 8 p.m. in Burruss Hall Auditorium.

Anderson co-founded the company Space Adventures in 1998 with several entrepreneurs from the aerospace, adventure travel, and entertainment industries. Space Adventures’ vision is to open spaceflight and the space frontier to private citizens.

Anderson has managed the company, selling close to $200 million in space tourist flights. He has also developed and financed over $500 million in new projects for Space Adventures, including two global spaceports and the first private voyage to the moon, which is set to launch in 2012, according to the company.

Over the next decade, according to the Space Adventures, it will fly more people to space than have made the journey since the dawn of the Space Age. Its clients will fly on suborbital flights, on voyages to Earth orbit, and on historic expeditions that circumnavigate the moon. Flights will leave from spaceports both on Earth and in space, visiting private space stations, and aboard dozens of different vehicles.

Space Adventures, the organizer of the flights for the world’s first and only private space explorers -- Dennis Tito, Mark Shuttleworth, Greg Olsen, Anousheh Ansari, and Charles Simonyi -- is headquartered in Vienna, Va., with an office in Moscow. It offers a variety of programs such as the availability today for spaceflight missions to the International Space Station and around the moon, zero-gravity flights, cosmonaut training, spaceflight qualification programs, and reservations on future suborbital spacecrafts.

The Virginia Tech’s Student Engineers’ Council is sponsoring Anderson’s talk. Admission is free and open to the public.