• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, September 15, 2010

Space geeks listen up. It may sound a bit futuristic, but a market exists to fly tourists, companies, government agencies and astronauts to the International Space Station or other low Earth orbit destinations. So, the Boeing Co. and Space Adventures have set plans in motion to market travel on Boeing commercial spacecrafts.

Edmund Memi, space exploration communications, a business unit of Boeing, says the company will build the spacecraft. Space Adventures will market passenger seats on commercial flights aboard the Boeing Crew Space Transportation-100 (CST-100) spacecraft to LEO. Potential customers for excess seating capacity include private individuals, companies, non-governmental organizations, and U.S. federal agencies other than NASA. Boeing plans to use the CST-100 to provide crew transportation to the International Space Station (ISS) and future commercial LEO platforms.

Boeing has a mock up of the spacecraft and testing the technology, but the company still needs a contract from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), but Memi says that won't happen until congress debates the details to fund development.

Commercial flights won't become available until 2015, assuming NASA gets the funding they need and Boeing gets the contract to develop it, but Memi says Space Adventures acknowledges it can begin marketing flights now.

I'll admit it. I'm a space geek. My father has worked in the space and defense industry my entire life, most recently supporting Boeing by designing flight software for planes and satellites, and working on the Space Shuttle in one capacity or another, so I couldn't help but fly head first into this one.

Space Adventures didn't return calls to provide additional information on the marketing plans, so a few experts were nice enough to chime in.

All SEO programs begin with the keyword research and targeting because it helps brands understand how people search for information. SEO is often about having all teams on board, from social to public relations and everyone in all business units in between, says SEO Training Dojo David Harry.

Focus groups could help to lay out an organic search strategy. "Ask them to search on Google for information about low orbit space travel at the consumer level," Harry says. "Get then to try and book a flight searching from Google to see what they can actually do."

Harry says bidding on and winning the wrong keyword can mean lots of pain and lost money down the road because ranking for terms that bring little traffic or conversions wastes resources.

Keyword research, the first step, will assist Boeing and Space Adventures understand potential customers. Do consumers know the product exists and what are their initial thoughts? Tapping that understanding will assist the brands not only find potential customers, but name the services, says Jeff MacGurn, senior manager at search company Covario, San Diego, Calif.

MacGum says if Boeing and Space Adventures give the space flight services a proprietary name they will need to spend money branding it. Tapping into a vocabulary many people use for the product name and it will keep the interest of many by virtue of the name.

Marketers attempting to define the audience demographics for space flight might become surprised after running a few tests. The customer might not be the wealthy 30-something who made millions after selling his Internet start-up, but rather the poor working fellow who takes out a second mortgage to buy the ticket into flight. That, of course, would determine where Boeing and Space Adventure would place video, rich media, paid search and display ads.

Developing a content to market space flight could also work, MacGum says. The hypothetical contest -- What would you do in space? -- could include a 15-second video response and ultimately determine the winner of the golden ticket into space. Crowd sourcing would allow people to vote up the best idea. The contest would likely attract attention and stir up "free" coverage.

Although Boeing made a name for itself in space travel, Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic has a leg up when it comes to commercial space flights. Search on the keywords "space flights," and Virgin Galactic's Web site returns within the first three listings on the search engine results page (SERP).

Aaron Goldman, chief marketing officer at Kenshoo, believes it couldn't take more non-traditional marketing to reach this audience, depending on the price. "How do you reach Mark Cuban and Ashton Kutcher?" he says. "Well, they're on Twitter a lot."

Boeing and Space Adventures have not yet set a price per seat for spaceflight, but plan to do so when development gets under way. Start saving.