Publicly announced by the company on Wednesday, June 13, 2007, the space plane would take off like an airplane and conventionally fly to about 12 kilometers (7.5 miles). At which time, its rocket engine, powered by a combination of liquid methane and liquid oxygen, would ignite. The power from this rocket engine would send the spacecraft to an altitude of about 100 kilometers (62.1 miles) above the Earth’s surface—what is generally called the edge of space.

After about three minutes of weightlessness, the space plane would return to the Earth after a total trip time of about 1.5 hours, and then land like a regular airplane.

(The Kármán line, or the edge of space, is the boundary between the Earth’s atmosphere and outer space, as defined by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI), an international standards organization for aeronautics and astronautics.)

The estimated 90-minute trip would consist of four paying customers and one pilot. Each wealthy customer would pay an estimated amount of between US$199,000 and $267,000 for the experience of a lifetime.

Officials with Astrium see advantageous of their system over the various ventures proposed by U.S. private companies. Basically, company officials state that they saw a lack of “engineering or business-model seriousness” of those systems. Astrium chief technical officer Robert Laine states, “There are those who think you can design a rocket plane in a garage. Suffice it to say that that is not our niche.”

Space tourism, the company states, should be a multi-billion dollar business within twenty years. In the United States, alone, the company envisions about 4,500 paying customers by the year 2020—and overall about 15,000 customers. Proposing to begin operations in 2012, the company expects $1.2 billion in gross revenues per year.

Astrium is now looking for investors to fund the enterprise, which is expected to involve five rocket planes that would be reused like a normal jet airplane. Each space plane would fly about once per week. However, private investment is the only hurdle standing in the way for their venture to get off the ground and into space.

EADS Astrium became a company from the July 1, 2006 merger of the EADS Space subsidiaries EADS Astrium, EADS Space Transportation, and EADS Space Services.

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