Third Space Tourist is Set

Sgt York writes "Space Adventures announced yesterday that Gregory Olsen will be their next private space tourism client. He paid $20M to hop on a Soyuz, sometime by 2005, and go spend some time on the ISS. The cool thing is, he's not just playing tourist. He's the CEO of Sensors Unlimited, has a MS in physics, and a PhD in materials science. He's planning on using the trip to 'help inspire today's youth to dream big' and conduct a few experiments, including testing out some of his company's equipment. SA is billing him as his own 'private space program.'" There's also a space.com story.

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Re:Tax Deduction

[PIPBoy3000]

I'm sure you're right. Here's a recent blurb about them in the news. It looks like they do a fair bit of business with the Air Force, so NASA's practically sending one of their own.

Sensors Unlimited, Inc. (Princeton, NJ), provider of short wave IR imaging products based on indium gallium arsenide (InGaAs) technology, has received a follow-on, Phase 1b contract from the U.S. Air Force, for a twelve month, $2 million program to develop the industry's first high frame rate camera for combined imaging and ranging, using an in-pixel digitized, monolithic PIN/APD focal plane array. The Department of Defense Missile Defense Agency is providing the funding under a contract managed by the Air Force. Sensors Unlimited was the only vendor to address both imaging and ranging within a single focal plane array and camera. The company says that it will "significantly advance the state-of-the-art in infrared imaging."