![]() "They put up everything that they could throw in the way to make it not happen," Shelley told. So NASA did what it could to keep Tito from getting off the ground in April, according to Tito and Space Adventures officials. "And what are they going to do, transport a corpse back to Earth? That would be very embarrassing for them, and traumatic." "If you're older, heart attacks happen, strokes happen, whatever," he said. Tito thinks his age may also have been a factor. "During this period, the presence of a nonprofessional crewmember who is untrained on all critical station systems, is unable to respond and assist in any contingency situation which may arise, and who would require constant supervision, would add a significant burden to the Expedition and detract from the overall safety of the International Space Station," reads a NASA press release from March 19, 2001. They just didn't think Tito's training would be sufficient by April, which they said was a time of complex and crucial station operations. NASA officials said at the time that they didn't object in principle to the presence of a paying customer aboard the orbiting lab. They informed Russia that they "recommended against" Tito's mission. But the other station partners - notably NASA and space agencies from Canada, Europe and Japan - were not so thrilled. ![]() The Russians agreed to take Tito's money and offer him a seat on a Soyuz. ![]() The station was a relatively new project at the time, having just begun assembly operations in November 1998. He signed on with Space Adventures, which brokered an April 2001 flight to the International Space Station, again on a Soyuz. Undeterred, Tito soon made other arrangements. (Mir burned up in Earth's atmosphere in March 2001.) However, those plans fell through in December of that year, when Russia announced that it planned to deorbit the aging station. In June 2000, Tito signed a deal with a company called MirCorp to ride a Soyuz to Russia's Mir space station. "So I was gettting over the hill, I thought," Tito told. The oldest rookie spaceflyer at the time, after all, was NASA astronaut Deke Slayton, who first made it to orbit in 1975 at the age of 51. He would turn 60 later that year, and he felt like his chances of getting into space were rapidly running out. In early 2000, Tito started working toward making his dream a reality. "And I basically came up with that lifelong goal around the time of Yuri Gagarin's flight." "My dream was to fly in space before I die," Tito said. But he was once an engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and has been a space enthusiast since he was a teenager. Tito made his millions in the world of finance.
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