If you ever wanted to take a trip to the International Space Station, or fly on board a rocket into orbit, now's your chance. Space Adventures, the only commercial company to have sent private, paying, space tourists to the space station, has announced that it will have three seats available per year on a Russian Soyuz rocket starting in 2013.

The announcement resumes a business that was put to rest in 2009 after eight flights, or about one per year, and seven people—billionaire Charles Simonyi actually flew twice. The Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) decided to not fly any more private space tourists to the station on board its Soyuz spacecraft because the agency is soon to be the sole transporter of U.S., European, Canadian, and Japanese astronauts to ISS. The U.S. space shuttles are set to retire this year and a new U.S. launch vehicle, expected to be SpaceX's Falcon 9, will not be ready until 2015. In addition, in 2009 the space station increased its capacity from three crew members to six, increasing demand to fly to low Earth orbit.

Space Adventures agreement with Roscosmos for the flights is in large part due to the agency's plans to increase production of the Soyuz spacecraft, from four to five spacecrafts per year. For those willing, the seats can be bought now for a high cost—tens of millions of dollars—and trips last an average of 10 days.

Space Adventures has also partnered with Boeing to sell passenger seats for future flights on its new crew capsule, CST-100, currently in development.

The Mars500 facility in Moscow. Credit: ESA

Six people will soon find out what it would be like to live on Mars by enclosing themselves in a Russian-built mock-up of the red planet for 520 days. The group is part of a European and Russian experiment, called Mars500, designed to provide a better understanding of the mental and physical challenges of such a long-duration expedition.

The experiment will start this summer. It follows a 14-day mission in the simulated chamber in 2007, and a 105-day mission last year. The new mission is the final phase of the experiment.

The facility, which mimics the red planet's landscape, includes a mocked up interplanetary spaceship and Mars lander. For the simulation, the crew will spend 250 days in a spacecraft traveling to Mars, then 30 days exploring it's surface, during which 3 people will move to the surface simulator and the others will remain in the spacecraft. The remaining 240 days will be spent traveling home.

During the mission, the crew will experience emergency situations like communication failures and food rationing, and will be required to conduct scientific experiments in an isolation chamber. Researchers hope to gather data on the crew's psychological health--crews have to keep journals and fill out questionnaires throughout the experiment--to better prepare humans for the loneliness of extended exploration missions. The mission will be almost three times longer than the longest mission on the International Space Station (six months), and the participants will spend majority of that time in a small spacecraft journeying to the red planet.

A crew member's bedroom in the facility. Credit: ESA

On Monday, the Obama administration announced its 2010 budget for NASA. It cancels plans to return to the moon by 2020 and focuses on using commercial companies to ferry astronauts to and from orbit.

While some are up in arms over the future of human spaceflight, Buzz Aldrin is backing the president in an editorial in The Huffington Post.

Aldrin calls Obama's decision his "JFK moment." He praises the president for deciding "to redirect our nation's space policy away from the foolish and underfunded Moon race that has consumed NASA for more than six years, aiming instead at boosting the agency's budget by more than $1 billion more per year over the next five years, topping off at $100 billion for NASA between now and 2015."

Aldrin has been far from shy about criticizing the Constellation program, previously calling the launch of its prototype rocket, Ares I-X, "fake" and "a little more than a half-a-billion dollar political show." He thinks that NASA should be spending taxpayer dollars on developing technology for trips to Mars, and he backs a "flexible path" plan that would "redirect NASA towards developing the capability of voyaging to more distant locations in space, such as rendezvous with possibly threatening asteroids, or comets, or even flying by Mars to land on its moons."

NASA's administrator, Charles Bolden, said in a press conference Tuesday that he and senior White House officials will spend the next few months devising a new overarching goal for NASA, and a schedule for developing technologies to send astronauts to destinations as yet unknown.

But Obama's budget proposal still has to be approved by congress. "My biggest fear is that this amounts to a slow death of our nation's human space flight program," Representative Bill Posey, Republican of Florida, said in a statement.