Space Tourism

Would you like to spend a week in space? You don’t have to be a professional astronaut and train for many years. You only have to train for a few weeks, learn some Russian, and pay $20 million. On April 28th, 2001, American Dennis Tito became the first space tourist. He paid $20 million to the Russian Space Agency to spend eight days on the International Space Station. A year later, a 28-year-old South African named Mark Shuttleworth became the second tourist in space. The Russians said that they will send up to 50 tourists into space by 2020. However, the people at NASA, in the USA, believe that the space station is for science, not for tourism. Everyday space travel gets a little cheaper, safer, and easier. Some scientists think that in the year 2025, space tourists will probably have to pay only about $100,000 in order to spend a week on a space station. They also think that companies will build hotels in space and that up to a thousand tourists a year will travel in space.