ABSTRACT
The first space tourist, Dennis Tito, paid for a seat on a Russian Soyuz rocket and spent a week at the International Space Station in April 2001. A year later, Mark Shuttleworth repeated this experience. A third space tourist, Lance Bass had been training for a similar space trip scheduled for October 2002 until negotiations between Bass’s representatives and the Russian Space Agency broke down (Berger, 2002). The NASA Shuttle Columbia disaster in February 2003 resulted in the cessation of further shuttle flights for a considerable period and the suspension, at the time, of further flights by other would-be orbital space tourists.
