Orbital space tourism

At the end of the 1990s, MirCorp, a private venture by then in charge of the space station,
began seeking potential space tourists to visit Mir in order to offset some of its maintenance
costs. Dennis Tito, an American businessman and former JPL scientist, became their first
candidate. When the decision to de-orbit Mir was made, Tito managed to switch his trip to
the International Space Station through a deal between MirCorp and U.S.-based Space Adventures,
Ltd., despite strong opposition from senior figures at NASA. Space Adventures remains the
only company to have sent paying passengers to space.

In conjunction with the Federal Space Agency of the Russian Federation and Rocket and
Space Corporation (Energia), Space Adventures facilitated the flights for all of the
world's first private space explorers. The first three participants paid in excess of
$20 million (USD) each for their 10-day visit to the ISS.

On April 28, 2001, Dennis Tito became the first "fee-paying" space tourist when he visited
the International Space Station (ISS) for seven days. He was followed in 2002 by South African
After the Columbia disaster, space tourism on the Russian Soyuz program was temporarily
put on hold, because Soyuz vehicles became the only available transport to the ISS.
However, in 2006, space tourism was resumed. On September 18, 2006, Anousheh Ansari,
an Iranian American (Soyuz TMA-9), became the fourth space tourist
(she prefers "private space explorer"). On April 7, 2007, Charles Simonyi,
an American billionaire of Hungarian descent, joined their ranks (Soyuz TMA-10).

In 2003, NASA and the Russian Space Agency agreed to use the term 'Spaceflight Participant'
to distinguish those space travelers from astronauts on missions coordinated by those two agencies.
Tito, Shuttleworth, Olsen, Ansari, and Simonyi were designated as such during their
respective space flights. NASA also lists Christa McAuliffe as a "Space Flight Participant"
(although she did not pay a fee), apparently due to her non-technical duties aboard
the STS-51-L flight.

The end of the Space Race, however, signified by the Moon landing, decreased the emphasis
placed on space exploration by national governments and therefore led to decreased demands
for public funding of manned space flights.