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In litigation, lawyers for the company said McPike had bought not a seat but “an opportunity” to be part of a potential mission.

“It is an undeniable fact that the Russians have never sent a man around the Moon and that the U.S. had not done so in forty years,” they wrote in one filing.

Space Adventures declined to comment for this story. In one court hearing, an attorney for the company said it is “not in the business of litigating, they’re in the business of getting people to space.”

Unlike Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, Space Adventures is not trying to build its own tourist rockets. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) The company contracts with the Russian government, which uses investments from tourists to modernize. NASA also buys seats on Russian rockets.

But Anderson, the co-founder and chairman, is the first and only entrepreneur to successfully send tourists — seven of them — to the International Space Station. He set out to be the first to get them to the moon.

Anderson has founded several other companies, with mixed success. Planetary Resources, an asteroid-mining project, floundered before being bought last year by a blockchain company. Planetary Power, which aimed to bring hybrid generators to places off the electric grid, folded.

Former board members of Space Adventures — now part of a company called Zero-Gravity Holdings — have complained that Anderson kept investors in the dark.