A Brief History of Private Space Travel

It’s one of the delicious ironies of history that the first private space travelers were facilitated by the Soviet (then Russian) space program. By the early 1990s, with the fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of the Soviet Empire, the space program that had astonished the world with the first flight of Sputnik and the first man to orbit the Earth was strapped for cash. The decision was made to use space vehicles developed by the Soviet Union in its struggle against the capitalist West to take paying customers on trips into space. It was an oddly capitalist solution for a country that was once the forefront of world socialism.

The first private space traveler to fly under this new arrangement was a reporter for the Japanese television company Tokyo Broadcasting System, Toyohiro Akiyama. Akiyama, whose employer paid twenty eight million dollars for his trip, began training as a private cosmonaut in 1989. He flew to the space station Mir in December, 1990, spending just over seven days in space. He conducted a broadcast from Mir and performed a number of experiments for Japanese and Russian companies.

Helen Sharman, the first British and first non American, non Soviet female space traveler, flew next, in May, 1991. She was chosen from among thirteen thousand applicants in a lottery that was sponsored by the Soviet Union and a number of British companies. Most of Sharman’s eight day flight took place on the space station Mir where she performed experiments, photographed the British Islands, and participated in an amateur radio conversation with British school children.

Dennis Tito was undoubtedly the first “space tourist” (a term he abhors) insofar as he is the first person to travel into space after personally paying for the privilege. Tito was a former scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory who founded a company called Wilshire Associates, which provides investment management, consulting and technology services. Tito made a considerable amount of money in his switch from space science to investment consulting.