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| Science & Technology |
| Iranian Trekkie To Become First Female Space Tourist |
| 2006-07-23 |
| AS a girl growing up in Tehran before the Islamic revolution, Anousheh Ansari watched repeats of Star Trek and dreamt of becoming an astronaut. She never tired of telling friends that one day she would “see the stars”. Nearly three decades later, Ansari’s childhood fantasies are about to come true as she prepares to become the first female space tourist. Now a multi-millionaire in the United States, Ansari, 39, who made her fortune from telecommunications software, has secured a flight in a Russian Soyuz rocket to the international space station 220 miles above Earth. “It would be nice to get outside the planet and see the universe for what it really is,” she said. Earlier this year Ansari passed stringent medical tests and spent weeks in training at Star City, the space centre outside Moscow that has prepared every Russian cosmonaut since Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space in 1961. She is scheduled to fly next year but could make the trip — which will cost her about £10m — later this year if a Japanese businessman who is due to become the next space tourist drops out. “Ansari expressed an interest to fly aboard one of our craft late last year. She’s very passionate about space,” said Sergei Kostenko of Space Adventures, a US-based space travel company that has a contract with the Russian space agency to fly tourists. “She came to Moscow for preliminary talks, passed the medical tests in February and has been studying in Star City since April. She’s been living there most of the time. She’s thrilled and very much looking forward to the year ahead.” Female astronauts are no longer rare, especially in America. But Ansari — who has endured arduous G-force tests and has been taught to fire a gun to protect her from wild animals in case of an emergency landing in Russia’s wild steppes — will be the first woman to pay for the privilege. With a fortune of several hundred million dollars, she can easily afford the fare, which works out at nearly £50,000 a mile. No other tourist has done more to develop commercial space travel than Ansari, however. She recently signed a contract with Space Adventures and the Russians to develop a fleet of sub-orbital spaceships for commercial use. “They have proved there is a market for space tourism by having been the first company to fly a private citizen into space,” she said. She also donated heavily towards a £5m cash prize — afterwards named the Ansari X prize in her honour — won by SpaceShipOne, which two years ago launched the first manned space flight funded by private investors. However, it is in the more earthly field of female liberation that Ansari’s journey of discovery could have the greatest impact, particularly in Iran where many women are treated as second-class citizens. |
| Posted by:Anonymoose |
| #2 I strongly suspect that she and her family are Zoroastrians, not Moslems. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2006-07-23 11:21 |
| #1 Good for her! A millionare who's put her money where it would TRULY do mankind a lot of good. |
| Posted by: Ptah 2006-07-23 08:53 |