PlanetSpace, a company promoting space tourism, co-founded by Chirinjeev Kathuria joined three other NewSpace rocket firms to offer free rides to teachers into space as part of the Teacher's In Space (TIS) project of the Space Frontier Foundation.
Chicago-based PlanetSpace says it will be ready to take passengers up 60 miles -- among them two teachers -- in 2008.
Its Silver Dart Spacecraft is in the last stage of its completion.
"PlanetSpace is showing it understands the need to inspire the next generation of students and teachers, and we appreciate their offer to join our team," Bill Boland, project manager of the Space Frontier Foundation's TIS project, said.
Other companies participating in the TIS programme include Dallas-based Armadillo Aerospace, Oklahoma's Rocketplane Limited, and California's XCOR Aerospace. Their vehicles that reach to the edge of space are expected to be ready by 2007-2008. The ride is valued at between $100,000 and $200,000.
Each company uses a different approach to near-earth spaceflight, but all understand the need to excite the next generation of students to study science, math and engineering, according to the Space Frontier Foundation.
"No matter where they are from, these teachers will take their student's imaginations with them as they climb aboard our rocket," said Kathuria, PlanetSpace's chairman of the board.
"Their excitement and inspiration will be contagious, and given the short turn around time of our spaceflight programme, they can be back in the classroom and sharing their experience in just days, rather than months and years."
The TIS has a goal of flying a hundred or more teachers a year aboard the new space vehicles as they come online the next few years.
PlanetSpace is the first company to join the programme launch outside the US. The launch will take place from Nova Scotia in Canada.
The TIS project has garnered widespread support from educators. Beginning with these donated 'seed' flights, the group is seeking companies to sponsor 'spaceflight scholarships.'
"The promise of space is about going beyond boundaries. Any student who watches their own teacher flying into space is going to be soaring right along with them into new realms of possibility," Rick Tumlinson of the Foundation noted.
NASA earlier offered a Teacher in Space project that cost millions of dollars per flight. That programme selected only a few teachers, and required them to leave their classrooms for months, if not years. The TIS flights are cheaper and will take only a few weeks' training.
PlanetSpace was formed last year as a partnership between Ontario-based Geoff Sheerin, who has been developing the Canadian Arrow rocket for space tourism, and Kathuria, a founding director of the Mir Corp that sent the first tourist into space in 2000.
PlanetSpace expects to fly almost 2,000 new astronauts in the first five years of flying and generate revenues of $200 million in the fifth year, Kathuriua and Sheerin said.
Its vehicle can carry five passengers and six crew members. It will travel at four times the speed of sound. By comparison, the space shuttle travels at 20 times the speed of sound. When the vehicle reaches 62 miles above sea level, the passengers will begin experiencing weightlessness and they can view the curving earth with a black sky above.
Kathuria, who was born in India, has lived in Illinois since he was eight months old. An MD from Brown, he also holds an MBA from Stanford.
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