Most of the media’s coverage about Anousheh Ansari’s upcoming flight to the ISS has billed her as the first female space tourist. Or is she? In a NASA Watch entry (perhaps more accurately described as a rant against the “hyping” of her flight), Keith Cowing says no: “The U.K.’s Helen Sharman was the first female space tourist when she flew to Mir in 1991.” The difference is that Ansari is paying for the flight, while Sharman was selected “by lottery” for her flight to Mir as part of a joint effort between the Soviet Union and several British companies.
But was Sharman a space tourist? The problem, here, of course, is that there’s no strict definition of the term, leaving lots of room for latitude. Paying for the flight should not be the primary criterion: on Earth, if someone wins a vacation to Hawaii or Las Vegas, they’re still considered a tourist. Should it be based on what they plan to do while in space? Sharman had a number of activities during her stay on Mir, including tending to experiments, photography, and educational outreach. That doesn’t sound like a tourist. Indeed, British space historian Rex Hall, responding to a question on the FPSPACE mailing list last week about whether she would consider herself the “first woman space tourist”, responded, “I think she would not enjoy that title.”
Then again, Ansari doesn’t consider herself a tourist. Her web site identifies her as the “First Female Private Space Explorer & Space Ambassador” and, among other things, she will be performing several experiments (or, rather, be the subject of several experiments) for ESA during her stay on the ISS. As she put it in a SPACE.com interview:
In a way I take offense when they call me a tourist because it brings that image of someone with a camera around their neck and a ticket in their hand walking to the airport to go on a trip somewhere and coming back to show their pictures. But I think spaceflight is much more than that.
I’ve been training for it for six months. I think if it is to be compared to an experiment or an experience on Earth it probably is closer to expeditions like people who go to Antarctica or people who climb Mount Everest. I mean that requires a lot more preparation, thinking, and studying or appreciation of the environment. So I would probably compare it more to an expedition than I would to a touristy trip to another city.
That attitude seems similar to two of her predecessors, Greg Olsen and Mark Shuttleworth, who engaged in a number of research and educational activities during their trips to the station. (Dennis Tito, though, reportedly seemed more content to be more like a tourist on the ISS, looking out the window while listening to opera.)
So perhaps neither Sharman nor Ansari should be considered the first female space tourist. (Ironically, Cowing, in his NASA Watch post, uses Sharman’s Wikipedia entry to prove his point. That entry, though, doesn’t call Sharman a space tourist, while Ansari’s Wikipedia entry calls her “the world’s first female space tourist”.) Perhaps it’s better to reassess the use of the term “space tourist” in general, although I suspect that the term has caught on enough with the media and general public to make it difficult to come up with alternatives that can supercede it.
Poor (lazy) Jeff. When he does not agree with someone else’s point of view, what they write automatically becomes a “rant” (your choice of words).
Let’s just call Ansari the first fee-paying muslim female spaceflight participant of Iranian descent, or FFPMFSPID.
She said that she is only semi-religious so that would be FFPSRMFSPID
She is also a Naturalized American Citizen and a resident of Texas. Add as you see fit.
[…] I expanded my earlier post on the term “space tourist” into a full-fledged article about the use of the term. As I note, for the time being, for better or worse, we’re stuck with the term “space tourist” whether or not such people act like, or consider themselves to be, tourists. […]