You Might Say His Career Is Taking Off

The most interesting thing about Dennis Tito’s space vacation may not be the trip itself, or that he paid $20 million to take it. It could just as easily be the man who helped make the billionaire’s space odyssey come true.

Eric Anderson is 26. You don’t hear much about him because he doesn’t like to talk, especially about himself. But let’s face it: Tito, at 60, is a front man for the future--a groundbreaking symbol of something likely to become much bigger and more enduring than he will live to see. Anderson, more than 30 years younger, is the future--a guy who combines soaring vision with the hard-nosed attitude of a hustling entrepreneur. The same kind of guy who, 150 years ago, understood that a railroad across the Rockies to the Pacific Ocean would open up the American West.

In Anderson’s case, the next frontier--space tourism--seems sorely overdue. Anderson says it’s been 40 years since Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space, and Alan Shepard, the first American in space, made their flights. “Since then, only 500 people have made the trip. We should have done better than that.”

Tito is the wiry financial titan who developed the Wilshire 5000 stock index, who spent his life at a desk with his eyes on the skies. Anderson, not yet five years out of college, heads a travel agency designed to take future tourists quite literally out of this world. He nabbed the biggest and best customer of all: the first man to pay for a holiday in space.

Before they met, about a year ago, they were on a parallel course without knowing it. Tito had worked with MirCorp, the group that had been trying to keep the Mir space station alive, on a plan to visit the station, which closed for lack of funds before the tycoon could get there. The projected cost of that flight, also $20 million, was in an escrow account.

Anderson--president and chief executive of Space Adventures, a 3-year-old firm in Arlington, Va., with about a dozen full-time employees--was pursuing his space travel agency dream. Because NASA isn’t tourist-friendly, Anderson’s firm had already joined with Russian authorities to analyze “what to charge and what protocol to use in order to get the right rich civilian into outer space.”

The figure of $20 million for an orbital flight was arrived at by Anderson and his Russian colleagues before he ever met Tito, Anderson says. By then, he already had “a few candidates lined up,” willing to pay the big bucks. (He declines to give their names.)

The firm already offers travel in six high-altitude, high-performance jets. A MIG-25 flight, for example, costs about $15,000, including a Moscow hotel stay and training.

Although outer space orbital flights like Tito’s are the company’s eventual goal, the cost for now is too prohibitive for most people to consider. So Anderson has commissioned independent aerospace companies to come up with designs for new kinds of spacecraft that would take vacationers on less expensive, suborbital flights.

He projects the cost of a suborbital flight at “only about $100,000--and we can book thousands of people each year for that. They spend that much right now on leisure. It costs that to get a really nice car, to join an expedition to climb Mt. Everest, or to visit the South Pole. So $100,000 is within the range of most wealthy people,” Anderson says.

Anderson says he first met Tito in March of last year, when he traveled to Tito’s Santa Monica office in an attempt to raise funds. “I described to him what we do, and he said he was interested in working with us to help build the new vehicles.” Talk turned to Tito’s own thwarted attempts to enter orbit. “I said why don’t you come with us to Russia. We’ll take you through all the cosmonaut and space training activities so you get a good idea of what it’s all about.”

The pair went to Russia together. “I flew with him in the zero gravity plane, [and] he went in the MIG-25, which is the high-altitude plane that’s the fastest combat aircraft in the world.”

Anderson says the MIG flight took Tito above 99.9% of the Earth’s atmosphere--to 85,000 feet--and when he hit that mark, he knew for sure he wanted to go for space itself. “We told him we would help introduce him to the people who could make it happen.”

Anderson declines to reveal the financial terms of his firm’s contract with Tito. The $20 million was apparently a separate sum, paid directly from the escrow fund to the Russian consortium that took Tito into space.

What the two might yet accomplish together remains to be seen. When Tito arrived back in Los Angeles last Wednesday from his trip to the International Space Station, he pledged to work to open space travel to ordinary people.

Anderson, whose firm is one of several working on space tourism, still needs funds to build the new tourist spacecraft--a 21st century equivalent of luxury cruise ships.

But that is just the first step, he says. He envisions much more than adventure tours. If the right spacecraft can be built, he says, a tone of zeal entering his voice, then no place on the globe will ever be more than 40 minutes away.

What’s that?

“With the right vehicles, which we are in the first step of developing now, we can have point-to-point transportation anywhere on the globe within 40 minutes,” Anderson says. The vehicles [would] go extremely fast because they travel out of the Earth’s atmosphere. No such vehicle exists now.”

Tito, who left engineering to make billions in money management, has the guts and the cash to help get it done. Anderson won’t comment on possible future deals. Does he consider Tito a personal friend? “Of course I do,” he says.

Anderson grew up in Littleton, Colo. He describes his parents as “entrepreneurs” who work together in real estate, and says he has been interested in space since the second grade. “My mom can tell you, I was always watching TV shows about astronomy and space. I read all of Carl Sagan. I wanted to be an astronaut, wanted to go to the Air Force Academy.”

But he was too nearsighted, he says, to do any of those things.

“I began to understand, as I grew up, what opportunities there were in space, what a frontier it was, how space could be opened up privately.”

While he studied aerospace engineering at the University of Virginia, he says he also worked on Space Shuttle experiments at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. That experience allowed him to meet a number of astronauts, who have influenced his life greatly, he says. Kathy Thornton, who worked in space to repair the Hubbell telescope, was one of his professors. She and another former astronaut, Buzz Aldrin, are now on Space Adventures’ board of directors.

He says the firm got its start at a conference sponsored by NASA in 1998. “A group of us who knew each other were all there. We said to each other, ‘You know, it’s really time to do this thing,’ meaning to start a space travel business.”

He says the firm is now booking passengers on suborbital flights that will begin “between 2003 and 2005, depending on when the vehicles get built.”

Long before then, Anderson will be a married man. He met his fiancee, Australian Danielle Amendolia, 26, at an adventure travel expo in Sydney. They will wed in November.

But, until the new aircraft are ready, they will have to defer a honeymoon in space.