EXPLORATION
This month, 10 civilians head to the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia, for the first-ever chance for ordinary folks to sample the Right Stuff.
Call it Space Camp for adults: a place where anyone with a spirit of adventure (and $15,000) can learn the finer points of orbital flight.
Travelers to the once top-secret center will don Orlan-M spacesuits, attend lectures by cosmonauts, "dock" the Soyuz on a flight simulator, learn navigation in the center's planetarium, and take a dip in a neutral-buoyancy tank, which simulates zero gravity.
The high point of the training - and the closest customers come to going into space - is a ride on the Ilyushin-76 aircraft, the Russian equivalent of NASA's "vomit comet." The plane makes a series of parabolic arcs, providing five queasy minutes of weightlessness.
"This is the birth of the space-tourism industry," proclaims Scott Fitzsimmons of Zegrahm Expeditions (www.spacevoyages.com), the Seattle company organizing the tour. The firm is also taking reservations for a two-hour suborbital flight slated for July 2002. Tickets are $98,000 - space-sickness bag included.
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