Russia offers space honeymoon

Russia offers space honeymoon

Agence France-Presse
From correspondents in Moscow


December 21, 2003

DESPITE banning marriages in space, Russia is offering newlyweds the
chance to swap Venice or the Niagara Falls for a cosmic honeymoon
romance by buying a $US40 million ($A54.04 million) ticket to space,
officials said today.

Russia's Rosaviakosmos space agency is proposing together with US firm
Space Adventures for couples to fly together to the International
Space Station (ISS) on a Russian Soyuz space craft, said Rosaviakosmos
spokesman Sergei Gorbunov.

"Under our contract with Space Adventures we have an option for
sending two space tourists at once on a Soyuz. So theoretically, young
married couples could make use of this possibility," he told the
ITAR-TASS news agency.

The asking price for a 10-day visit to the ISS is around $US20 million
($A27.02 million), a sum only two space tourists - Californian
businessman Dennis Tito and South Africa Internet millionaire Mark
Shuttleworth - have so far been willing to pay.

Both tourists' jaunts were organised by Space Adventures. The price
for a couple would be twice that amount.

Candidates, who would travel on board one spaceship accompanied by a
professional astronaut, would have to show they are in good health and
undergo eight to 10 months of training, the official said.

In addition, "they will have to prove they don't have bad habits,
money from illegal sources and don't belong to any terrorist
organisation," Gorbunov added.

The Russian space official did not specify whether sex would be
permitted for the space-bound honeymooners.

Astronauts are banned from having sex in space because of the possible
risks to the embryo if a female cosmonaut became pregnant.

In August this year, Russian cosmonaut Yury Malenchenko, 41, married
27-year-old Yekaterina Dmitriyeva in space, although the bride
remained firmly on the earth while he was aboard the orbiting space
station.

Malenchenko went ahead with the wedding despite the opposition of his
superiors at Rosaviakosmos, who saw the union as a potential breach of
security and stressed that in future "space marriages will be
forbidden".

Space Adventures, the Arlington, Virginia-based firm, which brokered
the first two tourist space flights in 2001 and 2002, has signed a
contract with Rosaviakosmos to fly two more tourists to the ISS in
2004-2005.

Russia and the United States, the major partners in the 16-nation ISS
project, have clashed in the past over Moscow's keenness to raise
money for its cash-strapped space program by selling tourist tickets
to the ISS.




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