Dennis Tito: The World's First Space Tourist

He was 60 years old, worth a fortune, and he held the most expensive ticket ever sold: a reported $20 million, one seat, destination — orbit.

Dennis Tito had dreamed of space long before he could afford it. Born in Queens, New York, he earned degrees in astronautics and engineering, then worked in the 1960s as an engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, helping to plan trajectories for the agency's early Mariner missions to Mars. He left rocket science for finance, founded the Santa Monica investment firm Wilshire Associates in 1972, and made his millions. But the dream of flying never left.

In 2000, Tito signed a deal with the commercial space company MirCorp for a trip to Russia's Mir space station. Those plans collapsed when the Russian government decided to deorbit the aging station. A Virginia-based company, Space Adventures, then brokered a new arrangement with Russia's space agency: a seat aboard a Soyuz spacecraft bound for the International Space Station — for a reported $20 million.

On April 28, 2001, the Soyuz TM-32 lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan carrying Tito alongside Russian cosmonauts Talgat Musabayev, the commander, and flight engineer Yuri Baturin. The flight was controversial: Tito had Russia's clearance, but NASA and the other ISS partners had not agreed to host him, and the space agency publicly complained that the still-under-construction station was not ready for guests. Russia, badly in need of funds to meet its station obligations, went ahead anyway.

The Soyuz docked with the station on April 30. Tito spent about eight days in space — 7 days, 22 hours and 4 minutes, circling the Earth 128 times — and returned on May 6 aboard the Soyuz TM-31. He insisted afterward that he was a trained crew member, not a mere tourist, and at 60 he ranked among the oldest people ever to fly in space.

What followed proved the doubters wrong. Space Adventures went on to fly six more private citizens to the station — Mark Shuttleworth in 2002, Greg Olsen in 2005, Anousheh Ansari in 2006, Charles Simonyi in 2007 and 2009, Richard Garriott in 2008, and Guy Laliberté in 2009. April 28, 2001, matters because one man's $20 million vacation was the first proof that a market for human spaceflight existed — the small, improbable seed from which today's commercial space industry grew.

Photo: NASA, public domain (via Wikimedia Commons).