MUMBAI: Seventies British pop star Sarah Brightman has booked a seat on a Russian spaceship that will take her 250 miles (400 kms) above Earth to the orbiting International Space Station (ISS). Brightman announced the news in a conference on Wednesday in Moscow.
Describing her endevour as ‘beyond her wildest dreams’ Brightman, 52, said, “I am more excited about this than I have been about anything I have done to date. Most of my life I have felt an incredible desire to take the journey to space that I have now begun.”
She will become the second space tourist after Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberte 2009 trip to travel on Russia’s Soyuz spaceship.
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Not disclosing the price tag for the trip, Brightman, who is UNESCO Artist for Peace said she would use her mission to promote education for women in the sciences and raise environmental awareness, news agency report said.
Hers is the ninth trip so far brokered by US firm Space Adventures; it is expected to be upward of $35 million. Russia charges NASA astronauts more than $50 million per seat. The adventure package includes 12 days in orbit.
Russian space official Alexei Krasnov said Brightman’s flight would likely take place in the fall of 2015.
Brightman, who is set to release her new album ‘Dream Chaser’ in January said, “As a child of the 60s, with all the rockets they were sending up and the first man on the moon – space was very much in the child’s understanding. When I understood that it was possible even to take a suborbital flight suddenly it was: ‘Yes that is what I have always wanted to do. This is my dream.”
She said she passed the rigorous pre-flight test at Russia’s Star City training centre outside Moscow ‘with flying colours’.
Brightman who starred in ‘Phantom of the Opera’ and also had a hit song called ‘I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper’ was married to composer Andrew Lloyd Webber in the 1980s and pursued a chart-topping solo career after they broke up in 1990.
