| By MARCIA
DUNN
AP Aerospace Writer
A
California millionaire who's about to become the world's first space tourist wants
to lead the charge into orbit by artists, musicians, novelists, movie producers,
actors--in short, anyone creative.
``I don't think anyone realizes how
beautiful space is,'' Dennis Tito said calmly as controversy swirled over his
space station visit.
``If space was something that the average person
could really appreciate in the literature, not being spoken by test pilots but
by artists, by creative people, even a reformed gang member from Watts. You know,
'Hey, man, this is a cool event.' To relate it to diverse groups of people in
our culture, maybe a rap singer, who knows? There's a tremendous opportunity there
to add value to our society,'' he said in a recent interview.
Never mind
NASA's stern admonition that space is no place for amateurs. Tito hopes his Saturday
launch aboard a Russian rocket and six-day stay on the international space station
will prove anyone can--and should--experience space.
The money generated
by paying customers, the financier says, would provide the capital needed to lower
the cost of launch vehicles and the price to get people to orbit. His eight-day
trip cost as much as $20 million; he won't specify how much he's paying Russian
space officials.
His No. 1 job when he gets back, besides returning to
his chief executive office at Wilshire Associates in Santa Monica, Calif., is
to spread his space-is-for-all message.
``Once I get back from my mission,
my entire intention is to just open my arms to NASA ... try to maybe get them
to think a little bit differently,'' he said.
Good luck.
NASA
waited until four days before Tito's scheduled launch from Kazakstan with two
Russian cosmonauts before signing off on his flight, and did so reluctantly. Russian
space officials insisted for months that it's their Soyuz rocket and they can
put anyone they want on board, an attitude that vexed their U.S. counterparts.
No more space cowboys, NASA warns.
The 60-year-old Tito is a one-time
exception, according to NASA and the European, Canadian and Japanese space agencies,
and from now on any space station guests will have to meet criteria agreed upon
by all the space station partners. Safety must be paramount, the agencies contend.
Tito agrees criteria are needed and points to himself as the perfect role
model, a space enthusiast long before he struck it rich.
The tycoon became
smitten with space travel while growing up in Queens, N.Y., the oldest child of
working-class Italian immigrants whose ancestors came from the town of Tito in
southern Italy. ``If you want to know what my house was like, just look at the
set of `All in the Family,''' Tito said.
Sputnik, the world's first artificial
satellite launched by the Soviet Union in 1957, sparked his teen-age imagination.
Tito earned bachelor's and master's degrees in aerospace engineering and
went to work in 1964 for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. He
charted flight paths for NASA's Mariner Mars probes, earning $15,000 a year. But
he yearned for more--more money.
Tito founded Wilshire Associates in the
early 1970s and by age 40 had made his first million. The millions kept piling
up; the investment firm now manages more than $10 billion in assets and advises
on $1 trillion in assets.
With disposable income galore, Tito toyed with
the idea of flying to Mir in the early 1990s. The Russians had just sent up a
Japanese journalist and a British chemist for cash, and Tito wanted to be the
next guest cosmonaut. But the Soviet Union's collapse ruined his plans--until
the MirCorp company came calling in April 2000 in hopes of keeping Mir afloat.
Tito put millions into an escrow account that the Russian space program
could access once he was launched to Mir, and moved from his Pacific Palisades
mansion into a spartan apartment at cosmonaut headquarters in Star City, outside
Moscow. There, the 5-foot-5, 140-pound, fit-looking businessman threw himself
into training. ``The Russians didn't cut any corners,'' he boasted.
When
Russia decided to sink its 15-year-old space station, officials offered Tito an
alternative destination--the international space station, barely 2 1/2 years old.
Another Soyuz spacecraft was needed at the space station as a fresh lifeboat,
and the third, empty seat was offered to him.
His switched ticket set
off a contentious debate between the Russian Space Agency and NASA and all the
other space station partners. The disagreement crescendoed last month when Tito
was barred from joining his two Russian crewmates in space station training at
Johnson Space Center in Houston. The cosmonauts boycotted their training for one
day, then relented--with the understanding Tito would be on board with them no
matter what.
Tito is thrilled with the change in travel plans. ``They're
different star hotels,'' he said of the two space stations.
He takes special
delight in launching from the same pad where Sputnik took off on Oct. 4, 1957,
and where the world's first spaceman, Yuri Gagarin, took off on April 12, 1961--40
years ago this month.
Tito will be the third American to be launched aboard
a Russian rocket, but the first to land in a Russian spacecraft. The Soyuz capsule
parachutes down into remote Kazakstan.
Tito also will be the oldest person
to be launched aboard a Russian rocket, and the third-oldest person to fly in
space. John Glenn flew at age 77, Story Musgrave at 61. (Tito's crewmates are
50 and 51, making this the oldest space crew ever.)
All three of Tito's
20-something children are at the Baikonur Cosmodrome for his launch.
Tito,
who's divorced, said his children accept his unusual choice in vacation, shrugging
it off as ``typical dad.'' His own father, long dead, would have thought he was
crazy. His mother, also dead, cried for nine months after he left New York for
California, ``so I can imagine she'd cry on this one.''
Tito insists he
is not afraid or even nervous about his flight.
``If you're going to die
of natural causes, does it pay to sit at home and be afraid to cross the street?
I mean, like Howard Hughes. What did he do? He became a recluse and was afraid
of germs,'' Tito said.
``The main thing is, I'm not crazy.''
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