Come on Up (to the ISS) You're the Next Contestant

Ender writes "The Voice of America and the NY times (Free registration, yetti, yatta ...) are running articles informing us that the Russian space Agency Rosaviakosmos has an agreement with Moscow to send a TV contest winner to the International Space Station. All contestants would train for space flight during the programs and this would show the audience how cosmonauts are trained prior to their space flight." Boy bands are ineligible.

Comments

Re:Why are they letting the Russians do this stuff

[ChuckDivine]

I cannot believe the other countries involved in the ISS are tolerating the Russians sending up every Tom, Dick and Harry that can front $20M, indirectly or directly. What about the safety issues presented by an incompetent civilian in an environment where a screw-up could jeopardize the lives of all the people on board ?

NASA has already sent up people who don't really belong. Politicians, for example. OK, they had some training. But, then, so do the people in the $20 million category. It's not like they're selling tickets on a Soyuz like, for example, airlines sell tickets on 747s. A hell of a lot of training goes with that ticket.

When Dennis Tito went up, I and others thought NASA's objections were at best disingenuous, at worst outright lies. The man had been an aerospace engineer and had received months of training before his trip. Yet NASA proclaimed how difficult his trip made things for them. I thought, what if something unexpected went wrong on the station not connected to that little trip? If the system was that fragile, it was a disaster waiting to happen.

NASA needs to develop technologies that are more robust. The country needs space technologies that are able to recover from at least minor problems. The Russians have done that to some extent.

And, of course, with each of these tourists Russia earns some badly needed hard money for their struggling program.