For those of you disappointed to find out that Google's Virgle, "a venture dedicated to the establishment of a human settlement on Mars," was just an April Fool's Day hoax, you'll be excited to hear that one of the company's founders has his sites set on outer space after all.

Space Adventures announced at a press conference today that Sergey Brin has invested $5 million toward a flight into space with the company, which has sent five private citizens into orbit since 2001.

As the first official member of the company's "Orbital Mission Explorers Circle" (there will be six in total), Brin now has a spot on a future orbital spaceflight of his choosing.

Before hitching a ride to the international space station with the Russian space agency in a Soyuz rocket, Brin will have to spend eight months training in Russia, not to mention forking over the remainder of the trip cost—which in the past has been $35 million or more for a little over a week in space.

The price tag might not be enough to faze Brin, who is a billionaire many times over, but the risks and time commitment ought to be.

This isn't Brin's first sign of interest in galactic exploration. Last year Google announced that it would sponsor the $30 million Lunar X Prize, awarded to the first team to land a privately funded robotic rover on the moon.

Assuming Brin's plans for planetary orbit are more than just personal curiosity, what is Google's big interest in space, and Space Adventures specifically?

For a company that helps turn the gears of the world's great democratic medium, the private-sector prospects for outer space so far seem decidedly elitist.

Space Adventures, which has been around for 10 years, already offers flights into orbit and has its sites set on adding on to the current voyages with trips around the moon and spacewalks. The company has also been working with Russian firms to build suborbital passenger spaceships, which within a few years will be offering flights—a technology that Sir Richard Branson is also pioneering with Virgin Galactic.  

And this year Space Adventures acquired Zero Gravity, which offers "weightlessness flights" via Boeing 727s flying here on earth.

The costs of participation are—to most of us, at least—prohibitive. Orbital flights cost in the tens of millions, varying based on the details of the mission; Space Adventures plans to charge $100,000 for a 90-minute suborbital flight, which slingshots passengers 62 miles up into Earth's atmosphere. Zero Gravity, which has flown 5,000 people to date and hopes to expand to as many as 100,000 passengers annually by 2018, charges $4,000 per 90-minute flight. More reasonable indeed, but still unlikely to replace an afternoon at Six Flags for your average American family.

Eric Anderson, founder of Space Adventures, admits that those prices are unlikely to change anytime soon.

"For the foreseeable future, the way 99.9 percent of us are going to experience space is in a zero-gravity plane," he says.

So while Space Adventures may make a decent living on billionaire passengers in search of a galactic vacation, the vast majority should plan on remaining earthbound.  

But Google's interests may lie simply in performing its own research, rather than opening the next frontier to the masses.

David Garriott, a son of a NASA astronaut and the next Space Adventures client scheduled to blast off in a Soyuz (on October 12) stresses the commercial, educational, and research opportunities that can make a private flight like this more than just a joyride.

Garriott said he personally will be conducting a number of experiments for academic groups and governments while in space, as well as providing a live video downlink to classrooms around the world. He is also subsidizing part of the cost of his trip with contracts from pharmaceutical companies to crystallize proteins for them in space (which are apparently very valuable for research purposes).

Garriott believes that with enough effort, one could offset most if not all of the entire cost of a flight with commercial contracts—and from Brin's perspective, he might believe that there is research and development to be done that is worth $35 million.

"Space tourism isn't really the right word for what we do. This is private space exploration," Anderson said.

Moving into the future, Space Adventures is gearing up to provide more support for research activities. The company announced today that it had agreed to purchase a Soyuz flight of its own (complete with Russian cosmonaut to fly it) from the Russian Federal Space Agency, which would add to the flights already scheduled by the Russian space agency in 2011.

That arrangement would not only give travelers valuable cargo space for experiments, but double the number of available passenger seats from one to two.

In other words, there's room for Larry too.