by Douglas Messier
Managing Editor

For eight years, they thundered aloft in cramped Russian spacecraft from a former Soviet spaceport in Kazakhstan, battling bureaucracy and gravity to blaze a trail across the heavens and redefine what it meant to be a space traveler. No longer would access to orbit be limited to highly trained astronauts chosen on merit and working on behalf of their nations; instead, space would be open to any sufficiently healthy people with enough money and moxie to qualify.

Space tourist Richard Garriott and cosmonauts Sergei Volkov and Oleg Kononenko have landed safely in a Soyuz spacecraft in Central Asia. Early reports are that all three space travelers felt fine after returning to Earth from the International Space Station. Garriott and Volkov are both second-generation space travelers. Richard’s father, Owen, flew aboard Skylab and the space shuttle. Oleg’s father Alexander flew aboard the Mir space station in 1991.

Russian technicians have rolled out a Soyuz rocket to the launch pad for an historic liftoff that will send the first South Korean and the first second-generation cosmonaut into orbit. Yi So-yeon, a South Korean bioengineering student, will join cosmonauts Sergei Volkov and Oleg Kononenko on a Soyuz TMA-12 flight to the International Space Station. Volkov is the first second-generation space explorer. His father Alexander logged 391 days in space […]

Sergei Volkov will become the first second-generation space traveler next month when he blasts off on an 11-day mission to the International Space Station. The 34-year-old Russian cosmonaut will follow in the footsteps of his father, Alexander, who took off for the space station Mir in October 1991. By the time he returned in March 1992, the Soviet Union had collapsed and he had become a Russian citizen. Sergei Volkov […]