Roman Chiporukha has built a career arranging unforgettable vacations. Now he is the one to call for a seat on a private spaceflight.
Roman Chiporukha has spent more than two decades turning extravagant travel dreams into reality. He and his partner own the luxury lifestyle firm Roman & Erica, and he has arranged everything from the construction of a client’s superyacht to a Bahamas getaway at a location so private that guests must sign a nondisclosure agreement.
Those experiences, he says, gave him “the ear of the ultra-high-net-worth audience.” They also led to a phone call that would change his life. In 2018, Axiom Space contacted him to find three citizen explorers willing to pay $50 million each to join the first fully private mission to the International Space Station, scheduled for April 2022.
Chiporukha successfully signed up the private astronauts and went on to launch SpaceVIP in 2021, a company offering celestial experiences that blend culture, science, and purpose. Here is what it takes to become the Expedia of the cosmos.
He is not an astronaut or aerospace engineer, so he had to quickly teach himself the nuances of commercial spaceflight. To help private citizens skip the rocket science headache, he has consolidated the highly fragmented space sector into a single, seamless digital portal, allowing adventurers to research suborbital flights and far out itineraries as easily as they would a weekend getaway. Still, he insists they need an expert fixer who can secure “the perks, the custom requests, and the upgrades.”
SpaceVIP receives dozens of inquiries a month, but Chiporukha assists only a small, exclusive group in designing custom adventures based on their budgets and physical comfort zones. Acting as a bridge between dreamers and strict aerospace parameters, he works with operators such as 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 voyage lasting six hours aboard a stratospheric balloon 15 miles above Earth, an option he describes as “relatively affordable” if a few hundred thousand dollars does not seem like much.
Making space travel widespread remains a steep climb in terms of cost and technology. But Chiporukha believes more people simply need to become interested. He cofounded the Space Prize Foundation, a nonprofit that runs science competitions for young women and groups underrepresented in STEM. Winners receive 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.”
For Chiporukha, the path to a spacefaring future starts with making space feel open to everyone, not just the ultra wealthy.
