NEXT SPACE TOURIST by Veronika Glosova

Computer game developer and the son of former NASA astronaut Owen Garriott, Richard Garriott, will be the next space tourist after Dennis Tito, Mark Shuttleworth, Greg Olsen, Anousheh Ansari and Charles Simonyi . He is planning a mission to an International Space Station (ISS) in October 2008 and he is paying about $30 million for this experience. The spaceflight is the first in a series of missions that will accommodate commercial activity aboard the ISS. The whole mission is secure by the agreement between Russia's Federal Space Agency and Space Adventures. Space Adventures, Ltd., is the world's leading space experience company that now provides the opportunity to train as a private space explorer alongside one of its orbital spaceflight candidates, among professional astronauts. The training for Garriott's commercial mission to the ISS has already begun in Russia. He is at the Yuri Gagarin Training Center, which is named after the astronaut who orbited space in April 1961. Garriott is spending there six weeks because of initial medical checks and the first round of training for space flight a Soyuz spacecraft. Garriott has to learn a lot before his space flight. At first it is Russian language. According to his own words it is not easy as he has never learned a second language. Secondly he has to learn about onboard systems as well as theories. He plans to spend in the space approximately nine days. During these days he will perform protein crystallization and Earth observation experiments. Richard Garriott is chronicling his spaceflight training and mission at his personal Web site: www.richardinspace.com.

related story: http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20080121/sc_space/nextspacetouristbeginstrainingforspaceflight

by Veronika Glosova for PocketNews (http://pocketnews.tv)

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