Space invaders

Bulgarian software firm Orak Engineering is going after the lucrative space travel vertical. Dave wonders why

It gives me great pleasure now to award the inaugural Diamond-Geezer Award for Bizarrest, Bafflingest, Broken-Englishest Tech Innovation of the Week to the one and only Orak Engineering of Plovdiv.

Those bonkers Bulgarians have only gone and "officially presented world's first software solution for space tourism". For some reason.

The product is apparently "optimised for managing the activities of the companies for private space flights and all other interested participants in that new and very perspective segment".

Orak chief executive Krasimir Stoyanov is known as one the shrewdest cookies in Plovdiv area (probably) and he reckons, right, that "waiting [space] tourists now run to thousands".

"The price for one person is about 100 000 US dollars and they have a potential of over 20 billion US dollars profit till 2020," he adds, confusingly.

Which quite possibly makes now the most ideal time in the entire history of stuff to launch a space tourism software solution.

"Krasimir Stoyanov expect that the space tourism software system sector will reach the amount of 15-30 million US dollars in near future," adds the company blurb.

This may well be a high-growth area (and I get the feeling a one-dollar market this year would represent significant expansion) but I do wonder whether the IT consumers of Barking and Dagenham will be among the waiting thousands queueing up to go into space.