Tito Requests Meeting With Russian Space Boss

SPACE TRAVEL

Tito Requests Meeting With Koptev

Dennis Tito before lunch

Moscow (Interfax) Jan. 31, 2001
U.S. space "tourist", well-known American financier Dennis Tito, has asked General Director of the Russian Aviation and Space Agency Yuri Koptev for a personal meeting.

Koptev expressed readiness to meet with Tito and to discuss with him details of Tito's mission to the International Space Station, as well as the program of his time on the station, the agency's press service has told Interfax.

It will be a working meeting, the date of which will be set after Tito recovers from pneumonia. Tito is undergoing medical treatment at the Russian Defense Ministry's Central Research Aviation Hospital.

Sources in the Russian center for training cosmonauts have announced that Tito's condition is satisfactory and that he is expected to be released from the hospital next week.

He is expected to beginning training in a week. Experts in the center do not doubt that in the time remaining Tito will manage to undergo a complete course of training. Instructors are conducting theory classes to Tito right in the hospital, the sources said.

Tito is to be sent to the International Space Station on April 30, jointly with a Russian crew comprised of crew commander Talgat Musabayev and flight engineer Yuri Baturin. This mission is to last for two weeks. The cost of Tito's flight is not being disclosed, but is estimated at about $20 million.

Tito is 60 years old. He is a graduate of an aerospace university in the U.S. and worked with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration for five years, taking part in a program for sending unmanned interplanetary spaceships to Mars and Venus. Subsequently, Tito organized his own company that deals, among other things, with the practical application of space technologies.

SPACE TRAVEL

Tito Signs On The Dotted Line For The Trip Of A Lifetime

Moscow (Interfax) Jan. 30, 2001
Head of the Russian Aerospace Agency Yuri Koptev has signed a contract for U.S. businessman Dennis Tito's flight up to the International Space Station (ISS) as a tourist on board the Russian 'Soyuz-TM' spacecraft, the Agency's press service has told Interfax.

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