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Sergey Brin, Google co-founder has made a $5 million investment in Space Adventures, a Virginia company that arranges passage for wealthy explorers to ride on Russian Soyuz rockets to the International Space Station.

He plans to buy a Soyuz flight to space in 2011, with the option of buying more.

The official announcement from Space Adventures in this regard will come in a news conference on Wednesday at the Explorers Club in New York.

According to Mr. Brin:

I am a big believer in the exploration and commercial development of the space frontier, and am looking forward to the possibility of going into space.

Space Adventures was founded in 1998 and so far it has sold more than $120M in space tourist flights. The company sells a variety of flights such as Zero-Gravity flights, cosmonaut training and actual spaceflights.

It is the only company that sends tourists to space and has sent five of them so far, the first being an American business man Dennis Tito who paid $20 million for a trip to International Space Station. But its continued ability to provide these orbital experiences has been a subject of speculation recently.

In April, Vitaly Lopota, the president of Energia, the Russian spacecraft company, said that he was no fan of space tourism and that his nation flew private explorers to make up for financial shortfalls. He said:

We have built the International Space Station(ISS) not for space tourists but for serving the needs of the people of Earth.

Space Adventures has seats reserved for flights to the space station this October and April 2009. Clients have paid $20 million to $40 million for their trips. The company did not disclose what the private flight will cost.

Tom Jones, a former astronaut and an adviser to Space Adventures said:

Passengers will have greater control over their flight and not simply be “piggybacking” on a government-sponsored flight. They could, for example, have more freedom to carry experiments of their own aboard the Soyuz, which has little cargo capacity, nearly all of it reserved for station business.

Space Adventures is in the process of developing of two commercial spaceports, one in the United Arab Emirates and the other in Singapore. The UAE spaceport is to be located in Ras al-Khaimah, located less than an hour drive from Dubai. In addition to suborbital spaceflights, Spaceport Singapore will operate astronaut training facilities and a public education and interactive visitor center.