NASA TV carried live the launch of the Soyuz TMA-9 spacecraft carrying Anousheh Ansari along with the Expedition 14 crew of Michael Lopez-Alegria and Mikhail Tyurin, and everything looks to be well. The Soyuz lifted off on schedule at 12:09 am EDT (0409 GMT) from Baikonur.
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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:
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. While Anousheh Ansari has been billed as the first female space tourist and the first Iranian-born person to fly in space, The Peninsula newspaper in Qatar profiles another prospective space traveler from that region of the world: Pakistani artist Namira Salim, who is one of Virgin Galactic’s founders. She is described in the article as “the first woman from the Middle East and Asia to fly into space on a commercial spaceship”, carefully distinguishing her from Ansari, who is flying on a noncommercial Soyuz. Salim, like Ansari, is an expat: she went to school in the US and now spends her time in Dubai and France. The article calls her a “sculptor, musician, poetess, astrologist, peace activist and humanist”, but despite her many talents, she doesn’t have much of a presence online: a Google search on her name turns up few references other than articles about her pans to go to space; one of the few exceptions is this older article about her, which we mentioned here back in April. Some various items about Anousheh Ansari and her upcoming flight:
Also, Ansari has made one final pre-launch entry on her blog, calling her feeling “a strange mix of excitement and anxiety”. She won’t be posting again until she reaches the ISS; “the internet onboard the Soyuz is not working.” An Interfax article today reports that Anousheh Ansari’s crewmates on the Soyuz launching late tonight, Michael Lopez-Alegria and Mikhail Tyurin, are impressed with her “professionalism”, as Tyurin put it, during her pre-flight training. “She has easily become part of the crew. One could think we’d been working for years together,” Tyurin added. An interesting comment from Lopez-Alegria:
(One wonders what Lopez-Alegria thinks of suborbital space tourism, where the requirements will doubtless be much less stringent than orbital flights, but also won’t be piggybacking on regular ISS flights.) The Interfax article also addresses the Iranian flag controversy, with Ansari saying that the flag she wanted to put on her spacesuit “had nothing to do with politics and only conveyed her personal attitude to the nation and its people.” The Las Cruces Sun-News reports that the city council will consider a proposal Monday to sell nearly 170 acres (68 hectares) of land near the city’s airport to the Rocket Racing League for $2.3 million. The RRL would also get right of first refusal on an additional 175 acres by the airport as well. The league plans to use the land for the “RRL Industrial Park”, which it calls a “world-class destination for businesses and tourists” and “a sought-after destination for visitors from around the world.” Something to tuck away in the back of your mind if you’re thinking of heading to Las Cruces in about a month for the X Prize Cup: Two anonymous letters, including one sent to the local newspaper, the Sun-News, threatened random shootings of residents unless city officials pay a ransom. Law enforcement officials are taking the threat seriously, but urged residents to go about their normal business, advice people appeared to be heeding yesterday. Anousheh Ansari is still writing posts on her space blog, and plans to continue to do so during her stay on the ISS. MSNBC reports that such space blogging, as well as planned podcasts from the station, won’t come cheap: the data/phone link costs $250,000. The X Prize Foundation is picking up the tab for the link (and is also hosting the blog); maybe they can recoup that by selling a lot of t-shirts at the X Prize Cup next month. A lot of t-shirts. WFAA-TV in Dallas reports on a minor controversy associated with the flight, namely Ansari’s original plans to wear both the Iranian and US flags on her spacesuit. According to the report, both NASA and Roskosmos officials forbade Ansari from wearing an Iranian flag patch, citing growing tensions about Iran’s nuclear program. The agencies also wanted Ansari to cover the Iranian colors visible in her mission patch; that is “still up in the air.” RSC Energia published some photos taken Wednesday during the crew’s inspection of their spacecraft and a press conference. In one photo a US flag patch, and only that, is visible on Ansari’s left sleeve. In another photo Ansari’s mission patch is visible on the right breast of her overalls; it doesn’t appear that the Iranian flag colors on it have been covered up. The UK Space Biomedicine Group is holding is 3rd Space Medicine Conference on September 30-October 1 at the National Space Centre in Leicester. The penultimate panel of the conference, according to the program, will focus on “medical issues for space tourism”. The featured speakers include a doctor working for Virgin Galactic, Dr. Julia Tizard, and a representative from Wyle Labs, which recently established a new business unit focusing on space tourism services.
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