Washington, D.C., Thursday, April 28, 2011 – Ten years ago on April 28, 2001, businessman and entrepreneur Dennis Tito became the first private citizen to pay his own way to travel to space, flying to the International Space Station for an eight day stay before returning safely to Earth. The flight made newspaper headlines around the world, and marked a landmark milestone in the growth of an entire industry devoted to commercial human spaceflight.

Eric Anderson, Chairman of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation and Chairman of Space Adventures, the company that brokered the ground-breaking flight, stated “Tito, a former NASA scientist, demonstrated in dramatic fashion that spaceflight was going to become accessible to private enterprise, not just government agencies. In the 10 years since Dennis Tito’s flight, we’ve seen numerous markets for commercial spaceflight open, ranging from NASA missions and space tourism, to scientific research.”

“Dennis Tito’s journey paved the way for private investors to begin financing an entire commercial spaceflight industry,” said John Gedmark, Executive Director of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation.

A diverse group of investors have since stepped up to the plate to make the new industry a reality, committing a total of approximately $1.5 billion of private investment between them according to an independent study “Commercial Spaceflight Industry Indicators” by the Tauri Group. In 2004, the $10 million Ansari X PRIZE, with funding provided by Anousheh Ansari who herself made a private trip to the International Space Station, was won when SpaceShipOne completed a pair of back-to-back flights to suborbital space. SpaceShipOne was built by the well-known aircraft research and development company Scaled Composites, with funding from Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen.

“Since Dennis Tito’s flight in 2001, there’s been a steady drumbeat of accomplishments toward realizing this new future. The Ansari X PRIZE was won, hundreds of people have placed deposits for suborbital flights, NASA lent its endorsement by committing hundreds of millions of dollars through the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) and Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) programs, SpaceX became the first company to privately launch and recover a space capsule, and a whole group of companies began making initial test flights of a new generation of reusable suborbital spacecraft.” added Gedmark. “We are enthusiastically looking forward to what happens in the weeks and months ahead.”

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