Roman Chiporukha is turning from earthbound luxury travel to an exclusive new frontier.
Roman Chiporukha has long turned wild travel dreams into reality. Over two decades as co-owner of the luxury lifestyle firm Roman & Erica, he has orchestrated everything from the construction of a client’s superyacht to vacations in the Bahamas at a location so private that guests must sign an NDA.
The experiences earned him “the ear,” he says, “of the ultra-high-net-worth audience.” It also led to a life-changing phone call: In 2018, Axiom Space wanted to find three citizen explorers willing to pay $50 million each to join the first fully private mission to the International Space Station (ISS), slated for April 2022.
This showed Chiporukha that the sky was no longer the limit; it was the market. He successfully signed up the private astronauts and then launched SpaceVIP in 2021 to offer celestial experiences that mix culture, science, and purpose.
Here’s what it takes to become the Expedia of the cosmos.
Chiporukha isn’t an astronaut or aerospace engineer, so he had to fast-track his own education on the nuances of commercial spaceflight. To help private citizens skip the rocket-science headache, he has wrangled the highly fragmented space sector into a single, seamless digital portal, so adventurers can investigate suborbital flights and far-out itineraries as effortlessly as they would a weekend getaway. But he insists they still need an expert fixer who can secure “the perks, the custom requests, and the upgrades.”
SpaceVIP receives dozens of inquires a month, but Chiporukha helps just a small, exclusive roster design custom adventures based on their budgets and physical comfort zones. Acting as a bridge between starry-eyed dreamers and strict aerospace parameters, he works with operators like Axiom for multiday stays on the ISS, and with Blue Origin, SpaceX, and Virgin Galactic for other excursions. Spacefarers can choose, for example, a zero-gravity parabolic flight or a smooth six-hour voyage aboard a stratospheric balloon 15 miles above Earth—an option he says is “relatively affordable,” if you’re a person for whom a few hundred thousand dollars isn’t that much.
Making space travel widespread is an uphill climb in terms of cost and technology. But, Chiporukha adds, more people simply need to be interested. He cofounded the Space Prize Foundation, a nonprofit that runs science competitions for young women and groups underrepresented in STEM. Winners get zero-gravity flights and entry into immersive astronaut-training programs. “Making space more mainstream isn’t just about bringing down the cost of a ticket,” he says. “It’s about creating pathways into the industry and helping people understand that this future shouldn’t belong to a tiny group.”
Linda Childers is a California-based freelance journalist who writes about science, education, and health.
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