Excalibur Almaz

Excalibur Almaz is a private spaceflight company which plans to provide orbital space tourism, and provide test beds for experiments in a microgravity environment.

, Excalibur hoped to begin flights by 2012 with revenue flights starting as early as 2013.,SpaceflightNow, 2009-08-18, accessed 2011-01-07.

Company

Excalibur Almaz is based in Douglas, Isle of Man, with offices in Houston and Moscow. The company owns its spacecraft but contracts expert services, including refurbishment, launch, control, and recovery.

Company founders include CEO and space law expert Arthur M. Dula and space commercialization veteran Buckner Hightower. Chief of spacecraft operations is Leroy Chiao, formerly a NASA astronaut and Commander of the International Space Station.

Advisory Board members include: former Johnson Space Center Director, George Abbey; former Kennedy Space Center Director and former President of Lockheed Martin Space Operations, Jay F. Honeycutt; former space shuttle astronaut and VASIMR plasma rocket engine inventor, Franklin Chang-Diaz; former French astronaut Jean-Loup Chrétien, and former Russian cosmonauts, Vladimir Titov and Yuri Glazkov.

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