April 28,2001:1st Space Tourist Launches

摘要

With millionaire financier Dennis Tito's flight to the international space station (ISS), Russia dragged its ISS partners kicking and screaming into the era of commercial space tourism. Tito launched aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan April 28, 2001. For the 60-year-old Tito it was a return to the field in which his career had begun. Before making his fortune as the founder of the Santa Monica, Calif.-based Wilshire Associates investment management firm, he helped design spaceflight trajectories for the Mariner 4 and Mariner 5 interplanetary space probes at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.