Roman Chiporukha has spent more than two decades turning extraordinary travel requests into reality for some of the world's wealthiest clients. As co-owner of the luxury lifestyle firm Roman & Erica, he has arranged experiences that go far beyond conventional holidays, from overseeing the construction of a client's superyacht to organising trips to an ultra-private location in the Bahamas where guests are required to sign an NDA.
Over time, those experiences gave Chiporukha what he describes as 'the ear' of the ultra-high-net-worth audience. That access eventually opened the door to a completely different kind of travel.
In 2018, Axiom Space approached him about finding private citizens prepared to pay £36.9 million ($50 million) each to join the first fully private mission to the International Space Station, scheduled for April 2022.
Chiporukha signed up a private astronaut, then founded SpaceVIP in 2021, creating a business designed to connect wealthy adventurers with increasingly ambitious experiences beyond Earth.
A Willingness To Do Your Homework
Chiporukha was not an astronaut or an aerospace engineer when he entered the space industry, meaning he had to rapidly educate himself about the complicated world of commercial spaceflight.
That learning process became central to his approach. Space travel involves a highly fragmented collection of operators, experiences, and technical requirements, making it difficult for private citizens to understand what is actually available to them.
SpaceVIP aims to simplify that process by bringing different parts of the sector together through a single digital portal. The idea is to allow potential space travellers to explore suborbital flights and more distant itineraries with the same ease they might use to investigate a conventional holiday.
However, Chiporukha does not believe technology can replace personal expertise. Wealthy clients looking for unusual experiences still want someone who can handle the details and make their requests possible.
He says an expert fixer is still needed to secure 'the perks, the custom requests, and the upgrades'. That role puts Chiporukha between customers with ambitious ideas and the companies capable of delivering them.
Turning Big Dreams Into Real Trips
SpaceVIP receives dozens of enquiries every month, but Chiporukha works with only an exclusive group of clients. Rather than offering every customer the same experience, he helps individuals create adventures around their budgets and physical comfort zones.
Chiporukha works with operators including Axiom for multi-day stays on the International Space Station, while Blue Origin, SpaceX and Virgin Galactic provide other types of excursions.
The options do not all involve travelling into orbit. Customers can, for example, experience zero gravity on a parabolic flight or take a six-hour journey aboard a stratospheric balloon around 15 miles above Earth.
The balloon experience is described by Chiporukha as 'relatively affordable', although that depends heavily on the person paying for it. For someone who considers a few hundred thousand dollars a manageable expense, the idea represents a more accessible way to experience the edge of space without committing to an orbital mission.
For Chiporukha, this ability to match individual ambitions with what the industry can actually deliver is at the heart of SpaceVIP's proposition. The company is not simply selling tickets. It is helping clients navigate an unfamiliar industry and turn highly specific ideas into workable experiences.
Yet his ambitions extend beyond serving people who can already afford to travel into space. Chiporukha also believes the industry needs to attract a much wider audience if space travel is ever going to become more mainstream.
He co-founded the Space Prize Foundation, a nonprofit that runs science competitions for young women and groups underrepresented in STEM. Winners receive zero-gravity flights and access to immersive astronaut-training programmes.
For Chiporukha, encouraging interest in space is about more than making tickets cheaper. '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.'
That ambition sits alongside the luxury market that helped launch his space business. While SpaceVIP is focused on customers wealthy enough to consider extraordinary journeys, Chiporukha's work with the Space Prize Foundation reflects his belief that the future of space should eventually involve people beyond today's ultra-rich clientele.
His journey from arranging superyachts and private holidays to helping clients explore commercial spaceflight has therefore given him an unusual position in a growing industry. SpaceVIP is his attempt to bring the convenience of luxury travel booking to an experience that, until recently, belonged almost entirely to governments and professional astronauts.
