Brightman has a ticket to visit the space station
MOSCOW - British singer Sarah Brightman revealed on Wednesday that Russia will launch her as a space tourist to the International Space Station (ISS) in a multimillion dollar voyage aimed at “realizing dreams.”The soprano and crossover singer, 52, would be the first tourist to go into space since 2009, on a ticket costing tens of millions of dollars.
“I am planning to become a space flight participant,” Brightman, who had her first hit with a 1970s disco anthem “I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper,” told a news conference. The schedule for her flight “will be determined very shortly by (Russian space agency) Roscosmos and the ISS partners,” she added.
Brightman, known for her roles in West End musicals such as “The Phantom of the Opera,” said she has been approved medically and will do six months of training in Russia.
The commercial flights to the ISS for space tourists are organized through U.S.-based company Space Adventures, whose chairman Eric Anderson accompanied Brightman in Moscow.
“My journey is about realizing aims and dreams,” she said.
“I will be the first [musician in space] and would like to experiment and see how I can sing from space, and I would like to connect with the Earth in some way,” she said.
The singer said she had yet to choose which song she would perform in space.
Brightman rose to fame in the 1980s with roles in the wildly popular musicals of composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, who became her husband. They divorced in 1990.
Alexei Krasnov, head of human spaceflight at Roscosmos, said that the task of taking Brightman into space is “fully achievable in the nearest future.”
He refused to give the exact price of Brightman’s ticket as a paying passenger, saying it is a “big, huge sum counted in the tens of millions of dollars.”
AFP
with the Korea JoongAng Daily
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