Soyuz hangups and space tourists
American millionaire Gary Olsen became the third private citizen in space on October 1 when his rocket blasted of from Baikonur, Kazakhstan. Nine minutes after liftoff, the rocket reached its initial designated orbit with the 60-year-old founder of an infrared-camera company based out of New Jersey onboard.
Then yesterday, the Soyuz spacecraft docked with the International Space Station five minutes ahead of schedule on day 2 of its 10-day mission. Olsen reportedly paid $20 million to be a part of the re-supply mission to the ISS. Olsen and the other two cosmonauts will perform experiments while they are there in addition to supplying the space station.
Space “tourism” is a bit of a misnomer in this day and age, simply because it’s not a matter of writing a check and going for a ride. Olsen had to pass rigorous health checks and be trained before strapping into the Soyuz capsule. Indeed, Olsen says he prefers the term “space flight participant” to “space tourist,” and the term is probably more apt since he’s not just along for the ride. (There simply isn’t the resources to allow someone to literally just go for a ride into space.)
Russia has turned to space tourism in recent years to finance their largely-broke space program. The first civilian in space was Californian Dennis Tito, and Mark Shuttleworth of South Africa was second. Currently the United States is dependent on the Soyuz program because of the problems with the Shuttle program. But now there are legal issues to contend with because of a law passed in 2000 prohibiting space-station-related payments to Russia because they helped the Iranians build a nuclear power plant. In theory, this could mean no more continuous American presence on the ISS, though this seems unlikely.
William McArthur, another American alongside Mark Olsen is scheduled to remain on board the ISS when Olsen leaves. With this law in effect, it is unknown whether McArthur will be able to return home, as the Russians are under no obligation to fly him home if the US doesn’t pay. (Which seems perfectly reasonable, not that I think they’d leave him there.) NASA would like to replace him in the spring, but again, the Russians are not obligated to fly a replacement there, or return McArthur at that time. Fortunately for all parties involved, the US Senate agreed unanimously to lift the ban on purchasing Soyuz seats until 2012.
Once again, I think a mandatory expiration date for all laws is in order, here, to prevent silly situations like this from happening in the first place.
No Comments »
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post.
| TrackBack URI
You can also bookmark
this on del.icio.us or check the cosmos