Excalibur Almaz

Excalibur Almaz had its headquarters in Douglas, Isle of Man, with offices in Houston, Los Angeles, Moscow, and Tokyo. The company planned to provide a variety of deep space crewed exploration missions, micro-gravity science, and payload delivery. EA also aimed to offer Low Earth Orbit cargo and crew delivery and return.

In 2009, Excalibur Almaz hoped to begin flights by 2012 with revenue flights starting as early as 2013.

In October 2011, NASA signed an unfunded Space Act Agreement for work related to the Commercial Crew Development program. In July 2012, Excalibur Almaz Inc. (EAI) successfully completed its Commercial Crew Development Round 2 (CCDev2) partnership with NASA's Commercial Crew Program.

In 2010, Jonathan Clark, NASA flight surgeon on six Space Shuttle missions—and whose wife, Laurel Clark, died in the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster on shuttle mission STS-107—was a consultant on space suit and crew biological environment design for Excalibur Almaz.

In January 2012, Excalibur Almaz updated its mission service offerings to include lunar and deep space capabilities. Based on independent market studies, these missions beyond Low Earth Orbit will provide the best business opportunity for commercial space transportation companies. Because of these more ambitious service offerings, Excalibur Almaz had pushed back its first launch to 2015.

In June 2012, Excalibur Almaz signed an agreement with XCOR Aerospace for suborbital familiarisation and flight training services.

In 2012, plans, design and flight safety reviews were planned for 2015.

According to a 2012 interview with Art Dula, the chairman of Excalibur Almaz, the Excalibur Almaz capsule was supposedly at a "very high level of technical readiness" and could be flown within two to three years. The main issue of the first crewed flight of the Excalibur Almaz capsule was regulatory, according to Dula, as the VA capsule had already completed nine uncrewed test flights during the Almaz program, all of which were successful.

Spacecraft

Excalibur Almaz was designing a spacecraft based on the VA capsule hull from the TKS spacecraft. The VA is a space capsule from the Soviet space program, originally designed for the military Almaz space station program. The needed development of propulsion systems for the VA capsule was reportedly delegated to a then undisclosed European organisation as early as 2009. While the needed service module for an Excalibur Almaz capsule would have superficially resemble the FGB of the TKS spacecraft, it is based on Astrium's ATV design according to Art Dula, the chairman of Excalibur Almaz.

The potential Excalibur Almaz stations was to use two hulls from the Almaz space station program. The company's Soviet-era spacecraft were moved from Russia to Excalibur Almaz facilities on the Isle of Man in early 2011. EA "planned to use the modules to provide extra room and supplies for the tourists and researchers it hoped to ferry into space." Excalibur Almaz's two Salyut-class 29-ton space stations, each with a capacity of 95 cubic meters will serve as the heart of its lunar and deep space capabilities. The Soviet-era electronics have been completely gutted and supposedly replaced with modern avionics supplied from an unnamed company.

By using modernised, tried-and-tested equipment rather than developing technology from scratch, the project was reportedly saving around $2 billion in development costs. The Russian Proton rocket, launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, was intended to be used to launch one of the spacecraft into space, where it would have remained. Astronauts were to use the Excalibur Almaz RRVs to get to and from the spacecraft.

Training

Excalibur Almaz had established a 2012 agreement with XCOR Aerospace to provide a suite of suborbital flight experiences as training milestones in preparation for orbital and trans-lunar missions.