Forget exploring Antarctica or scaling Mount Everest—for some only the final frontier will do. This morning, Space Adventures (www.spaceadventures.com), the company that sent the first private citizen into space in 2001, announced big plans for the (immediate) future. In 2011, it will fund a private mission to the international space station via a Soyuz flight with a Russian commander as well as two citizen on board (one of the space travelers may well be Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google and a new investor for Space Adventures). It’s a first for the Virginia-based company, which until now only brokered choice seats for individuals on already scheduled missions (multi-millionaire Denis Tito was the first so-called “space tourist;” since his 2001 mission, four others have followed suit).

34-year-old Space Adventure president Eric Anderson made the announcement in New York’s Explorers Club during a packed press conference of journalists from the world’s major media outlets. Many sounded skeptical in the Q&A following the conference, probing particularly about safety concerns and the astronomical price tag attached to such a mission (the next private seat on an orbit flight will cost $35 million). Anderson was flanked by Richard Garriot, a founding investor of Space Adventures who will travel into space this October (he’s also a veteran of the computer gaming industry). Garriot was captivated by space travel from an early age: his father, Owen, was a NASA astronaut, making Richard the first second-generation space traveler. “It’s difficult to say what I’m most excited about, because you’re just going by what other people have told you,” he said. “But I am really looking forward to that first glimpse out of the window seeing Earth.”

Anderson, who said that he believes that 99 percent of the population have the desire to explore space, also outlined the company’s plan to step up its existing space-related programs for regular citizens, including sub-orbital flights and weightless parabolic flights. Space Adventures is already offering the latter on a regular basis from the John F. Kennedy Space Center. During a parabolic flight, you can experience about fifteen seconds of weightlessness (and at $3,950 per person).

Leaving the conference, you could hear murmurs of “You could pay me and I wouldn’t…,” but there was also sincere excitement about what the company calls “the next generation of space exploration.” Surely, the debate about what will effectively be the first commercial flight into space will only heat up in the coming years, as companies like Space Adventure and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactica push further into a realm formerly reserved to a few highly trained professionals.

And as for the biggest challenge Garriot, who has been undergoing vigorous training in Moscow for the past eight months, has faced so far? “I’ve had the most difficult time learning Russian,” admitted the 47-year old, who is documenting his progress on a weekly blog (www.richardinspace.com). “All the commands in the Soyuz are in Russian, so it’s crucial to understand it. But I’m getting there.” His launch is scheduled for October 12, 2008.

Read an article in the New York Times about Google c-founder Sergey Brin, who just became Space Adventure’s newest investor with the option of traveling into space in the future.