Space Adventures, a company with headquarters in Virginia, is the one that arranges space flights for people wealthy enough to pay for the trip on Russian Soyuz rockets and reach the International Space Station. The company looks forward to buy its own Soyuz flight in 2011.

One of the two available seats on the 2011 flight, arranged by Space Adventures, is likely to be occupied by Google's co-founder Sergey Brin. He invested $5 million in Space Adventures, which plans to announce the participation of Mr. Brin in the space flight on June 11, 2008. The announcement will be made at the Explorers Club, located in New York.

Sergey Brin, in his statement said: "I am a big believer in the exploration and commercial development of the space frontier, and am looking forward to the possibility of going into space." It is worth mentioning that Google is the sponsor of the Google Lunar X Prize, which represents a $25 million contest to land an unmanned spaceship on the moon.

Currently Space Adventures is the only company able to send tourists into space. However, its ability to send people into outer space has been subject to speculation. Vitaly Lopota, who holds the position of the president of Energia, the Russian spacecraft company, outlined that he is against space tourism since the international space station was not created for tourists but for the needs of human kind.

According to Anatoly Perminov, the head of the Russian space agency, the free places designed for tourist on Soyuz could disappear in 2010, when the space crew will be composed of six members instead of three. The American agency has reserved seats for space flights to the ISS this October and April 2009. Space tourists paid for the scheduled trips $20 million to $40 million.

"From a passenger point of view, you wouldn't be a fifth wheel on the flight to the space station. It's a move toward a more mature commercial space travel industry," mentioned Tom Jones, ex-astronaut who is currently an unpaid adviser to Space Adventures.