Is Laliberte the Last ISS Space Tourist for Years?
Canadian space tourist Guy Laliberte could be the last space tourist for many years unless the United States decides to extend shuttle missions beyond next year, the Associated Press reports:
Guy Laliberte, 50, spent about $35 million to reserve his spot on the Soyuz. He will spend 12 days aboard the orbiting outpost, and is expected to be the last space tourist to board the station for at least a few years due to the upcoming retirement of NASA’s shuttle fleet.
“Currently, there are no clear prospects for space tourism, but it all depends on the Americans,” Alexander Vorobyov, Roscosmos spokesman told the AP. “The heads of NASA and Roscosmos are due to meet (Wednesday), so we cannot make any calls on this just yet.”
Roscosmos head Anatoly Perminov has been quoted as saying that he has heard unofficially from NASA sources that a shuttle extension is possible. No one at NASA has publicly confirmed this claim.
Space Adventures has said it has a deal with Roscosmos to fly dedicated Soyuz flights to ISS starting around 2012. The flights would include one professional cosmonaut with two paying space tourists. These would be special flights outside of the normal Soyuz missions flown to change out crews at the orbiting outpost.
One response to “Is Laliberte the Last ISS Space Tourist for Years?”
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I hate to say this, but: I hope they extend STS operations for a few years.
It’s not for any love of the system. But there are several compelling arguments now.
The major one is economic: preserving jobs until the recession is over. To be sure, *new* space programs are ordinarily very bad candidates for economic stimulus, which should be “timely, targeted, temporary”. New space mission planning horizons are very long, so by the time you’ve figured out how to spend the money, the recession is long over by even by informal measures that really matter to people (like, when employment starts to pick up.) New missions fail the “timely” test. Investing in a low-productivity system is not well-“targeted” either. It’s better to invest in something that will pay dividends for a long way down the road (which is why FDR poured a lot of the New Deal spending into, well, long roads.) Finally, new space missions are hardly “temporary” — you’re lucky if they don’t end up spanning *two* recessions, end-to-end. It’s hard to do anything in space, start to finish, in under a decade.
Extending the life of a system slated for mothballs is at least something you can do in a “timely” and “temporary” manner, even if it’s not such great “targeting”: it supports employment in the program and (to a lesser extend) props up consumer confidence in the program host communities.
In more normal times, I’m no big fan of the Shuttle — it’s a botch. Nor do I buy the general argument that “NASA makes a lot of jobs” — I respond “Oh, so it’s as a *result* of the botch, it created more jobs than expected, for people who might be more productively employed in a better space program?”
But since there’s been a recent pattern of jobless recessions, and since they *could* extend STS with little more than pen-stroke, and since it apparently *would* mean that the Russians could continue with commercial passenger service, and since orbital tourism really *is* the only proven kind so far (and possibly the only kind that will ever be enduringly successful) . . . I’m willing to see the Shuttle get a new lease on life.
I just can’t believe I’m saying this.