A CNET News.com article about a speech Greg Olsen gave at a San Francisco conference this week provides some general details about his experiences as a space tourist, but also some interesting insight into how he got interested in taking the Soyuz trip to the ISS in the first place:
A New Jersey resident, Olsen got the idea for his trip one morning in 2003 while reading the paper at a local Starbucks. Space Adventures–a U.S.-based space-travel agency contracted with Russia–had sent the first two private citizens to ISS, according to a news article that day. Olsen, who was recently flush with cash from the sale of his optical technology company Epitaxx to a telecom operator, decided it was a good time to pursue a long-held dream.
One other trivia item of note: it appears that Huggies is the diaper brand of choice among Soyuz crew members.
In Planetes the romantic male lead starts out with a nickname of “Diaper Man”.
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I think that the REAL space business of the future will be the space-tourism since it is the ONLY that can give “high numbers” (about “money” and “peoples”) but space-tourism can’t grow only with the Soyuz, it (absolutely) needs a little, safer and cheaper “new-Shuttle” as I explain here: http://www.gaetanomarano.it/articles/008visual.html
gaetano marano
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