Space Adventures (Virginia): The first private space company provides spaceflights services to private astronauts in the United States

Space Adventures was founded in 1998 by Eric C. Anderson—president and CEO—with several other entrepreneurs from the aerospace, adventure travel and entertainment industries. The company is headquartered in Tysons Corner, Virginia with an office in Moscow.

Space Adventures offers a variety of programs such as Orbital spaceflight missions to the International Space Station, Circumlunar missions around the Moon, zero gravity flights, cosmonaut training programs, spaceflight qualification programs, and reservations on future suborbital spacecraft.

From 2001 to 2009, Space Adventures has arranged seven clients on eight successful space travels with the help of the flight-proven Russian Soyuz rocket system to the ISS, human’s only outpost in space. Among them, American businessman Dennis Tito cost twenty million dollars to become the first space tourist and Charles Simonyi was the fifth space traveler who visited space twice. In total, these seven clients spent over eighty days and went nearly thirty million miles (about 48.28 million kilometers) on the trip.

Dennis Tito

As a matter of fact, for each of these trips, the company must resort to the flight-proven Russian Soyuz rocket system and rent seats in its capsules. However, from 2011 to 2020, the US was incapable of launching American astronauts into space because of the retirement of the 7-person capacity Space Shuttle. Then in order to continue space exploration activities, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) drew up an agreement with the Russian space agency Roscosmos to buy in bulk seats on the Soyuz.

And as a result, when the Soyuz spacecraft became the only way to enter the ISS, its seats was insufficient and unavailable to Space Adventures, so these space trips organized by Space Adventures later ended.

Space Adventures therefore has not stopped developing its space tourism activities for private person. In February 2019, it contracted with SpaceX to allow paying space tourists on SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft to participate in a short tour that could reach an altitude two-to-three times higher than the ISS as early as the end of 2021.

In the same year, after NASA reached agreement with two commercial carriers which began its services in 2020, Spaceflight achieved with Russian Soyuz capsule to the ISS became possible once again, so recently, Space Adventures had purchased two of the available Soyuz seats for the next space tourism.

According to en.wikipedia and spacelegalissues.com