Virgin Galactic to launch tourism and scientific research space flights from the United Arab Emirates capital. In July 2011, Aabar invested a further to develop a program to launch small satellites into low Earth orbit, raising their equity share to 37.8%. Virgin announced in June 2014 that they were in talks with Google about the injection of capital to fund both development and operations. The New Mexico government has invested approaching $200m (£121m) in the Spaceport America facility, for which Virgin Galactic is the anchor tenant; other commercial space companies also use the site. In February 2007, Virgin announced that they had
Space tourism fly on Soyuz TMA-14 in March 2009. British-American Richard Garriott became the next space tourist in October 2008 aboard Soyuz TMA-14. As of 2018, Canadian Guy Laliberté is the most recent tourism to fly to the ISS, in September 2009 aboard Soyuz TMA-16. Since the Space Shuttle was retired in 2011, Soyuz once again became the only means of accessing the ISS, and so tourism was once again put on hold. Bigelow Aerospace acquired the designs for inflatable space habitats from NASA's Transhab program, and has already launched two first inflatable habitat modules. The first, named Genesis I, was launched