Anousheh Ansari was the only woman to buy a ticket Charles Simonyi made two trips. Over the next seven years, six more wealthy space tourists visited the space station. Tito then arranged for his trip to the I.S.S., which reportedly cost $20 million. Tito had originally bought a trip to the Russian Mir space station, but those plans fell through when Russia decided to deorbit Mir and focus on the I.S.S. Then Dennis Tito, an American businessman, became the world’s first space tourist, buying a ticket for a seat on a Russian Soyuz to the International Space Station.
#Live international space station professional
Until 2001, everyone who went to orbit was a government-employed professional astronaut. Russian Space Agency, via Associated Press Shepherd said, “was my happiest day in space.”ĭennis Tito, center, the first space tourist, spoke to journalists from the International Space Station in May 2001. And we’re not going to work a plan until you get one plan for one station. We’re a program for Houston and another one for Moscow. He said he told the people at mission control, “We’re not doing that. Shepherd, the commander, made his annoyance known. In the early days, the crew often received one set of instructions from NASA’s mission control in Houston and then later the Russian controllers in Moscow would change the plans. He said the three went around “with our hair on fire for about three hours trying to get this set up, because none of the components were in places where we expected to find them.”Įverything was put together, and the broadcast went as planned. “Our main job that first day was to assemble a cable, a camera, lights and some other components to do a live television downlink,” Mr. The Soyuz docked at the space station two days later. “It was a day that NASA would not have launched to space.” The first space station crew - William Shepherd of NASA and Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev of Russia - launched from Kazakhstan on a Russian Soyuz rocket on Oct.
The times of each pass will vary, from around 6:30pm on January 21, 23, 25, 27, 29 and 31 to around 5:40pm on January 24, 26, 28 and 30.The International Space Station viewed from the Space Shuttle Atlantis’s crew optical alignment system for undocking in September 2000. The Italian balloonist and four other amazing things spotted in the Glasgow skyĪstronomy website Meteor Watch have confirmed that the ISS will pass over UK skies from January 21 until February 7, with "incredibly bright passes" predicted on January 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31 and on February 1 and 3.Visible to the naked eye, NASA’s state-of-the-art orbiting research facility made very bright passes late in the evenings on a number of occasions as it orbited the Earth at 17,500mph at an altitude of roughly 200 miles.Īnd now Glaswegians are in luck again with the glowing space station - the largest man-made object in space - scheduled to make some more bright passes later this month and into February. Back in May last year, stargazers in Glasgow were afforded the incredible chance to wave at a NASA astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts as the International Space Station (ISS) passed brightly in the skies above the city.