they need to develop a launch vehicle even less expensive than the Soyuz. The Soyuz is extremely reliable and only costs a bit over $1000/pound to launch a payload, but it can only send up 3 average sized people. At least one of those people has to be a trained cosmonaut, so at best you can have 2 paying passengers per launch. I'm pretty sure that the number of people willing to pay $10-20 million for a trip to space is fairly small. If they could develop a booster capable of economically launching 1-2 additional paying passengers per mission, they could drop the per seat price quite a bit and still make money. Lower costs fares would probably increase the potential passenger pool quite a bit. One possibility might be a man-rated version of the Proton or Zenit capable of carrying the passengers and the cargo normally launched on the Progress vehicles. That would both increase the passenger capability and eliminate the need for $10-15 million Progress missions.