Unforgettable impressions of flight and weightlessness, delight and euphoria, the fulfillment of a cherished dream and the adventure of a lifetime – this is how the few lucky people who managed to visit space as tourists describe their feelings. The first among them was the American entrepreneur and businessman Dennis Tito. He visited the ISS in April 2001, paying $20 million for the ticket.
He prepared for flight for 8 months, underwent serious physical training and even mastered the basics of spacecraft control, up to its manual docking with the ISS in case of an emergency. Commercial flights to the ISS on Soyuz ships were carried out from 2001 to 2009. Their organizers were Roscosmos and the American company Space Adventures. Training for tourists and training for weightlessness took place in the Star City near Moscow and took an average of 6 to 9 months. In total, 8 tourist flights were carried out, and the cost of the most expensive ticket was $35 million.
For Dennis Tito, South African businessman Mark Shuttleworth, American millionaires Gregory Olsen and Richard Garriot, as well as the owner of the Circus du Soleil Guy Laliberte, went to conquer space. The first space tourist in 2006 was Anouche Ansari, whom Russian cosmonauts affectionately called Anyusha. And Charles Simoni, one of the founders of Microsoft, visited orbit twice – in 2007 and 2009.
The leaders among space “tour operators” along with Space Adventures are Blue Origin companies Jeff Basos and Virgin Galactic Richard Branson. The latter are distinguished by the simplicity of approach to the issue – instead of exhausting training and a difficult path to the ISS, they develop commercial suborbital tours up to 100 km from the surface of the earth and offer customers a kind of “dive into space.” Two and a half hours of flight with the fastest possible preparation and in fairly comfortable conditions give rainbow prospects for space tourism. Already, tickets for “space transfers” from Virgin Galactic are sold out several years in advance, and among those who have already booked a tour into space are Hollywood actors Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hanks and Angelina Jolie.