Space tourist Sarah Brightman to start training for spaceflight in Jan 2015
ZVYOZDNY GORODOK (Star City, Moscow region). Sept 3 (Interfax-AVN) - The British singer Sarah Brightman will start training for a tourist flight to the International Space Station (ISS) at the beginning of 2015, Yury Lonchakov, the chief of the Cosmonaut Training Center, told Interfax-AVN on Wednesday.
"She will start training at Zvyozdny Gorodok in January 2015, and so we expect her to come," Lonchakov said.
A training plan for Brightman has already been compiled, Lonchakov said. "I believe her training will be successful," he said.
It was reported earlier that the price for flying into space exceeded $50 million for the most recent tourists.
It was reported earlier that Brightman was getting ready for a 10-day tourist stay aboard the ISS, for which she is due to set off on October 4, 2015. Brightman is due to start a course at Russia's Cosmonaut Training Center on January 12, 2015. Her fellow travelers will be Russian cosmonaut Sergei Volkov and European Space Agency Astronaut Andreas Mogensen.
Space Adventures is the marketing agent for the organization of Soyuz tourist flights to the ISS.
American Dennis Tito, who went to the ISS in 2001, became the first space tourist. Mark Shuttleworth, who is a dual South African/British citizen, was the second, going to the station in 2002. In 2005, the station hosted one more tourist, American Gregory Olsen. In 2006, the first woman tourist, Iranian-born American Anousheh Ansari, arrived at the ISS. Each of them paid about $20 million for their trip.
The next tourist was Hungarian-American Charles Simonyi, who visited the ISS in 2007.
Richard Garriott, a dual British/American citizen and NASA Astronaut Owen Garriott's son, made a tourist flight to the ISS in 2008. Garriott paid $30 million for his childhood dream to come true, having raised the money via his business of video game development, which he abandoned after returning from space.
Charles Somonyi revisited the station in March 2009, making him the only person to have made two tourist space flights.
Canadian billionaire Guy Laliberte, co-founder and chief executive of Cirque de Soleil, traveled to the ISS as the next tourist late in 2009, paying more than $50 million for his flight.
