spacetoday.net: MirCorp confirms tourist flight talks with Lance Bass

Posted: Wed, Feb 20, 2002, 5:50 PM ET (2250 GMT)
ISS illustration (NASA)

MirCorp announced Wednesday that it has entered negotiations with Lance Bass, a member of the pop group *NSYNC, regarding a potential tourist flight to the International Space Station by the singer. Confirming reports first published Tuesday night by SpaceRef, MirCorp said that its media partner, Destiny Productions, has been talking with Bass about a tourist flight to the station as early as this November. If a deal is reached, Bass would become the third commercial space tourist, after Dennis Tito and Mark Shuttleworth, and at the age of 23 would be the youngest space traveler ever. While Bass is best known as one of the members of the popular boy band, he apparently has a latent interest in space: an MSNBC article noted that Bass attended Space Camp in Florida at the age of 12 and once considered working for NASA as a career goal. MirCorp said in a statement that it was in negotiations with other candidates, and noted that other companies are also trying to sign up space tourists for ISS taxi flights: the Tito and Shuttleworth deals were brokered by Space Adventures. The company gave no indication of a timeline for reaching a deal with Bass or another potential tourist. Any flight of a nonprofessional to ISS would have to be approved by the partner nations, using criteria recently released by NASA.