It’s easy to love magazines when you work at a magazine publishing company, and I LOVE magazines. A few subscriptions here at the office, and a few at home, keep my nose in some publication during most of my free time — which is significantly less now as I spend most of my time at home chasing my now-walking daughter around. Sometimes the issues pile up, and it takes me a while to get to them. Hence, why I’m about to direct you to an article in Wired magazine’s September issue.
“Welcome to Star City,” by David Kushner, follows online-gaming giant Richard Garriott’s 8-month stay at Russia’s cosmonaut training ground, Zvyozdny Gorodok (“Star City”). He’s there to prepare for his trip to the International Space Station. If everything goes as planned, Garriott will be seated next to NASA astronaut Mike Fincke and mission commander Yuri Lonchakov when the Soyuz TMA-13 spacecraft blasts off from Kazakhstan October 12 on its way to ISS.
You’d think that for $30 million, Garriott wouldn’t have to subsist on his own candy bars and macaroni and cheese, but that fee isn’t for amenities.
The article includes pictures from inside the “birthplace of spaceflight,” and it details the physical and technical training Garriott and actual cosmonauts go through before heading into space.
Here are a few more articles about space tourism: