IT WAS THE MOST expensive holiday in history, and yet you couldn’t even buy a margarita or go for a swim. But for 60-year-old businessman Dennis Tito, it was the fulfilment of his lifelong dream. Ten years ago, Tito hit global headlines when he became the world’s first space tourist, paying almost $20 million to spend just under eight days in space. That’s about $100,000 an hour – although it did include a visit to the International Space Station.
The engineer and entrepreneur from Queens, New York, could well afford the trip. As the founder and head of investment management company Wilshire Associates, which created the hugely influential Wilshire 5,000 index, Tito had amassed a personal fortune estimated at about €200 million; he had dreamed of travelling in space ever since Yuri Gagarin made the first manned flight in 1961, so he was happy to pay the fare to achieve his youthful ambition.
Tito didn’t want to be seen as just some rich guy looking to hitch a ride on a space rocket for kicks. At 60, he was as fit as a man half his age, had a degree in aeronautics and astronautics, and a master’s in engineering, and had worked for Nasa as a scientist. However, when told of Tito’s plans to finance his own flight into space, Nasa refused to countenance the idea, insisting that space was no place for amateurs. So Tito turned to the cash-strapped Russian space agency, who agreed to let him join two cosmonauts on a Soyuz mission to the International Space Station, and he began a rigorous training schedule at the cosmonaut headquarters at Star City near Moscow.
By some accounts, his cosmonaut companions weren’t too happy with the idea of sharing their cramped capsule with a civilian, and they were probably even less happy when Tito, despite his training and fitness, suffered from space sickness. He also was said to have received a cool welcome from the crew of the ISS. But nothing could spoil Tito’s joy at finally reaching space.
“It was a sense of completeness – from then on, everything is a bonus,” he said in a recent interview with the BBC World Service. “And the last 10 years, everything since then, has been just extra.”
At the time Tito made the flight, he was divorced from his wife Suzanne. His three children, then in their 20s, were at the launch to see their dad become the third oldest person to fly in space. Tito returned to Earth to find himself a worldwide celebrity and he set about working on his next goal – to help make space travel accessible to everyone. Ten years later, with Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic planning to take fare-paying passengers into space within the next two years, the dream may not be all pie in the sky.
“I hope that tens of thousands of people can experience what I experienced, for 5 per cent of the cost,” he said.
He has testified at several US Senate committees on commercial space travel and is in demand as a speaker. When he gave a talk to alumni at Stanford University, he met his current wife, Russian angel investor Elizabeth Pavlova Tito. The couple live at Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles. Kevin Courtney