For more than five years now Planet Oasis has lobbied for and promoted a future space tourism project at Tozeur.

The justification for such a project, unique in nearby Europe and the Mediterranean Basin, is Tozeur’s ideal location, in terms of both its geographic position and its especially favourable climate, a 3 km landing strip and little air traffic.

Initially it would consist of parabolic flights in weightlessness, with the collaboration of NOVESPACE, and later of the creation of a SpacePort in Tozeur, ready to host future suborbital flights by EADS ASTRIUM.

Parabolic flights have become an essential means of accessing micro-weightlessness, just like freefall towers, rocket probes, recoverable capsules, space shuttles and orbiting space stations..

Initially used for training astronauts, parabolic flights are today mainly utilized for technological testing of space hardware and scientific experiments.

The EADS Astrium (the space subsidiary of EADS) space tourism project was announced on June 13, 2007, in Paris. This project marks the first entry of a major player in the aerospace industry into space tourism. A life-size mock-up of the forward fuselage was shown at the Le Bourget Show in 2007.

This is a rocket-plane with a large wingspan, a foreplane in front and a straight wing in the rear. Propulsion is provided by classic jet engines for the atmospheric phase and a methane+oxygen rocket engine.
For the space tourism phase, it will carry a pilot and four passengers. Its dimensions and appearance are similar to those of a corporate jet.