[FPSPACE] AP: American millionaire confident Russians will honor his ticket to space

[JamesOberg@aol.com]

JimO: Anybody know any specific barriers to Tito riding the Soyuz replacement 
to ISS on April 30? Who at NASA has effective yay-or-nay control over this 
idea?


Nov. 26, 2000 
American millionaire confident Russians will honor his ticket to space
     STAR CITY, Russia (AP) - For years, people have talked of traveling to 
space as tourists, but it has only been talk - until now. 
     Dennis Tito, who started dreaming of space flight when he watched 
Sputnik's launch as a teen-ager, who worked as a rocket scientist charting 
paths to planets, then switched to investing and became a multimillionaire, 
has a ticket to ride. 
     The fit, 60-year-old Californian has left his 30,000-square-foot Pacific 
Palisades mansion for two rooms in the Star City cosmonaut training center in 
Russia to prepare for the launch, which could come early next year. 
     He has deposited millions of dollars - each one worth 28 rubles - in an 
escrow account, to be released to the cash-strapped Russian space authorities 
the moment he is launched as the first space tourist, but not a millisecond 
before. 
     That's all in his contract, his ticket. 
     ''The key is launch,'' Tito said recently during an interview in Star 
City. ''All they have to do is light the rockets and the escrow opens up and 
they get all the money. And it's a lot of money. ... There's a real strong 
incentive, I think, for the Russians to fly me.'' 
     But the question remains: Which space station will he fly to? 
     There's a chance, however slight, it will be a turn-out-the-lights 
mission in January to the Russian Space Agency's abandoned Mir. A suicide 
dive is planned for February, and a crew will be sent beforehand only if a 
problem in preparations arises. 
     More likely it will be a taxi ride to the newly occupied, NASA-led 
international space station Alpha. In April, the attached Soyuz capsule, the 
crew's lifeboat, needs to be replaced. 
     Tito says the pendulum has swung toward Alpha in light of Russia's 
recent decision to ditch Mir. Either way, if he hasn't left Earth by June 30, 
2001, the deal's off. That's also in his contract with the Russians. 
     ''I just hope this doesn't become some kind of a political mess between 
the two agencies or the two countries,'' he says with a sigh at the end of 
the training day, weary from the uncertainty surrounding his promised 
mission, not from the work. 
     A clash of titans, though, may be coming. 
     Yuri Semyonov, president and general designer of Russia's RSC Energia 
corporation, says he's committed to honoring Tito's contract. 
     He doesn't need NASA's or anyone else's permission to launch Tito on a 
Soyuz capsule to Mir, or to the international space station if Mir can be 
decommissioned by autopilot, Semyonov says huffily. 
     NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin finds the whole matter distasteful. 
It's wrong, he contends, to peddle spaceship seats to rich guys looking for 
fun. 
     ''I can't tell the Russians what to do. They're a sovereign program, a 
sovereign nation,'' Goldin says. ''But we do have a part to play in it 
because the lives, the safety of the astronauts are at stake,'' along with 
the future of the space station. 
     The NASA chief worries that Tito's deal could spur ticket demand for the 
international space station. And yet, he says, spare seats on Russian Soyuz 
rockets should go to European or Japanese astronauts who have been training 
for years, not to wealthy ''spectators.'' 
     The would-be space tourist insists he's more than a spectator. 
     The oldest child of working-class Italian immigrants became smitten with 
space the same way many did: with the launch of the first space satellite, 
the Soviet Union's Sputnik, in 1957. 
     ''That opened the Space Age,'' he says, his eyes bright with the 
recollection. ''To have experienced the excitement of seeing the first Earth 
satellite and then at the same time experiencing the fear that the Soviet 
Union was way ahead of us in technology ... what I saw when I was 17 led me 
to enroll in aerospace engineering the next year.'' 
     Tito ended up at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., in 
1964, plotting the flight paths for NASA's Mariner probes to Mars and Venus. 
During that time, he once called the space agency to get information on 
becoming an astronaut, but it never went beyond that single phone call. 
     Eventually, he put his dream on hold and changed course. 
     Quitting his $15,000-a-year lab job to start his own investment 
business, he made his first million before he turned 40. His firm, Wilshire 
Associates, is a powerhouse that manages more than $10 billion in assets. At 
his quarters in the cosmonaut complex, a computer chirps constantly with 
e-mail messages from his home office in Santa Monica, Calif. 
     Even as he built his business, though, the idea of space travel remained 
with him. 
In 1991, the now wealthy Tito, in Russia on business, found himself checking 
out the ''guest cosmonaut'' program, under which a Japanese TV reporter and a 
British chemist flew to Mir for a price. Tito was interested in 
participating, but the Soviet Union's collapse prevented that from happening. 
     Then, earlier this year, he got a call from MirCorp, the Amsterdam-based 
firm trying to raise money to keep the space station going, with commercial 
applications in mind. MirCorp eventually signed ''Survivor'' producer Mark 
Burnett for a ''Destination Mir'' series. And ''Titanic'' director James 
Cameron expressed interest in a trip to Mir, but did not put down any money. 
     Would Tito be interested, MirCorp wondered, in flying to a resurrected 
Mir? 
     In April, MirCorp's bigwigs went to his home in the Pacific Palisades 
area of Los Angeles and, within 15 minutes, a deal was clinched. 
     Tito, who's divorced with three children in their 20s, won't say how 
much he's paying for the one- to two-week space adventure. MirCorp's list 
price: $20 million. 
     Recalling the deal as he sits amid the Russian woods, more than an 
hour's drive from Moscow, Tito says his willingness to undergo months of 
rigorous training - he's taking a break to go home for Thanksgiving - shows 
his serious intentions. 
     Day after day at Star City, morning until evening is spent cramming. 
Besides classwork, Tito has endured eight times the force of Earth's gravity 
in the centrifuge and spent considerable time in a Soyuz mock-up. 
     ''It's not a prison or anything,'' Tito said in early November, sitting 
in his Star City apartment. ''But it's a far cry from someone of my living 
standard would have.'' 
     How many rooms are there in his Pacific Palisades home, by comparison? 
     ''I never even counted them,'' he says. ''It's 30,000 square feet on 
nine acres with a guest house and a pool house, a running track. It's 
probably one of the biggest houses in the city.'' 
     Trappings of success aside, Tito insists he's not ''just a wealthy guy 
who's looking for kicks.'' 
     He stresses: ''I'm not crazy. ... I haven't let the success go to my 
head. I've let the success say: Look, let's take my life in more places. 
Let's make life more fulfilling.'' 
     To be launched from the same pad where Sputnik soared would be 
especially gratifying, since it's Sputnik that motivated him 43 years ago. 
     ''I could just see myself lying on my deathbed at 90,'' Tito says, ''and 
saying, 'Yeah, what a life. You did it all. You made the full circle.' '' 
     There's nothing wrong with civilians shelling out cash for the 
opportunity to fly to space, says Alex Roland, a former NASA historian who 
teaches at Duke University. But to Mir - scene of an intense fire and 
near-catastrophic collision in 1997 and uninhabited since June? (The fate of 
Mir appears to be sealed: Russia's cabinet decided on Nov. 16 to abandon the 
space station and let it fall into the Pacific in February on its 15th 
birthday.) 
''To think people would line up to pay big money to get on the Titanic like 
that ...,'' Roland says. Still, he called Tito's ''an open contract among 
consenting adults.'' 
     NASA astronaut Ken Bowersox, who served as the backup for international 
space station skipper Bill Shepherd, considers it money well spent. 
     ''It's not like the money is just going to waste,'' Bowersox notes. 
''That money is going to go into the space program and it's going to pay for 
people over here, it's going to pay salaries. ... He's supporting the program 
and that helps us.'' 
     Some at NASA worry about Tito's physical ability to handle a space trip. 
If anything goes wrong, the safety of the entire crew could be jeopardized by 
this cosmonaut-come-lately. 
     ''He meets the parameters,'' Semyonov responds, noting Tito had to pass 
all the cosmonaut medical tests. 
     Short, slim and bald, Tito looks years younger than 60. Evidence of a 
healthy lifestyle is everywhere in his Star City apartment: worn running 
shoes, whole-wheat pasta, organic tomato sauce, soy protein. 
     He says he was inspired by John Glenn's return to orbit at age 77 in 
1998: ''If he wasn't too old, I'm not too old.'' Yet he quickly notes, ''I'll 
be the oldest person to fly the first time. The oldest rookie.'' 
     Tito insists he won't be shattered if the Russians break their contract 
and he never makes it to space. 
     ''The way I look at it is, every day counts and every day I'm learning 
about manned space flight. I'm learning about systems. I'm not sacrificing 
anything in terms of my business. My business is trucking along. 
     ''I'm learning how to be alone. I'm learning how a different society 
works. I'm meeting astronauts and cosmonauts. I'm living in a spartan 
environment and learning that I don't need all this wealth and if I didn't 
have this wealth, I'd still be happy. 
     ''Oh, I've already won.''