California Tycoon Holds the Ultimate E-Ticket: Spaceflight

For years, people have talked of traveling to space as tourists, but it has only been talk-- until now.

Dennis Tito, who started dreaming of spaceflight when he watched Sputnik’s launch as a teenager, who worked as a rocket scientist charting paths to planets, then switched to investing and became a multimillionaire, has a ticket to ride.

The fit, 60-year-old Californian left his 30,000-square-foot Pacific Palisades mansion for two rooms in the Star City cosmonaut training center in Russia to prepare for the launch, which could come early next year.

He has deposited millions of dollars--each one worth 28 rubles--in an escrow account, to be released to the cash-strapped Russian space authorities the moment he is launched as the first space tourist, but not a millisecond before.

That’s all in his contract, his ticket.

“The key is launch,” Tito said recently during an interview in Star City. “All they have to do is light the rockets, and the escrow opens up and they get all the money. And it’s a lot of money. . . . There’s a real strong incentive, I think, for the Russians to fly me.”

But the question remains: Which space station will he fly to?

Turn Out the Lights

There’s a chance, however slight, it will be a turn-out-the-lights mission in January to the Russian Space Agency’s abandoned Mir. A suicide dive is planned for February, and a crew will be sent beforehand only if a problem in preparations arises.

More likely it will be a taxi ride to the newly occupied, NASA-led international space station Alpha. In April, the attached Soyuz capsule, the crew’s lifeboat, needs to be replaced.

Tito says the pendulum has swung toward Alpha in light of Russia’s recent decision to ditch Mir. Either way, if he hasn’t left Earth by June 30, 2001, the deal’s off. That’s also in his contract with the Russians.

“I just hope this doesn’t become some kind of a political mess between the two agencies or the two countries,” he says with a sigh at the end of the training day, weary from the uncertainty surrounding his promised mission, not from the work.

A clash of titans, though, may be coming.

Yuri Semyonov, president and general designer of Russia’s RSC Energia corporation, says he’s committed to honoring Tito’s contract.

He doesn’t need NASA’s or anyone else’s permission to launch Tito on a Soyuz capsule to Mir, or to the international space station if Mir can be decommissioned by autopilot, Semyonov says huffily.

NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin finds the whole matter distasteful. It’s wrong, he contends, to peddle spaceship seats to rich guys looking for fun.

“I can’t tell the Russians what to do. They’re a sovereign program, a sovereign nation,” Goldin says. “But we do have a part to play in it because the lives, the safety of the astronauts are at stake,” along with the future of the space station.

The NASA chief worries that Tito’s deal could spur ticket demand for the international space station. And yet, he says, spare seats on Russian Soyuz rockets should go to European or Japanese astronauts who have been training for years, not to wealthy “spectators.”

The would-be space tourist insists he’s more than a spectator.

The oldest child of working-class Italian immigrants became smitten with space the same way many did: with the launch of the first space satellite, the Soviet Union’s Sputnik, in 1957.

“That opened the Space Age,” he says, his eyes bright with the recollection. “To have experienced the excitement of seeing the first Earth satellite and then at the same time experiencing the fear that the Soviet Union was way ahead of us in technology . . . what I saw when I was 17 led me to enroll in aerospace engineering the next year.”

Tito ended up at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada in 1964, plotting the flight paths for NASA’s Mariner probes to Mars and Venus. During that time, he once called the space agency to get information on becoming an astronaut, but it never went beyond that single phone call.

Eventually he put his dream on hold and changed course.

An Investment Fortune

Quitting his $15,000-a-year lab job to start his own investment business, he made his first million before he turned 40. His firm, Wilshire Associates, is a powerhouse that manages more than $10 billion in assets. At his quarters in the cosmonaut complex, a computer chirps constantly with e-mail from his office in Santa Monica.

Even as he built his business, though, the idea of space travel remained with him.

In 1991, the by-now wealthy Tito traveled to Russia on business and found himself checking out the “guest cosmonaut” program, under which a Japanese TV reporter and a British chemist flew to Mir for a price. Tito was interested in participating, but the Soviet Union’s collapse prevented that from happening.

Then, earlier this year, he got a call from MirCorp, the Amsterdam-based firm trying to raise money to keep the space station going, with commercial applications in mind. MirCorp eventually signed “Survivor” producer Mark Burnett for a “Destination Mir” series. And “Titanic” director James Cameron expressed interest in a trip to Mir, but did not put down any money.

Would Tito be interested, MirCorp wondered, in flying to a resurrected Mir?

In April, MirCorp’s bigwigs came to his home in Pacific Palisades and, within 15 minutes, clinched a deal.

Tito, who’s divorced with three children in their 20s, won’t say how much he’s paying for the one- to two-week space adventure. MirCorp’s list price: $20 million.

Recalling the deal as he sits amid the Russian woods, more than an hour’s drive from Moscow, Tito says his willingness to undergo months of rigorous training--he took a break to go home for Thanksgiving--shows his serious intentions.

Day after day at Star City, morning until evening is spent cramming. Besides classwork, Tito has endured eight times the force of Earth’s gravity in the centrifuge and spent considerable time in a Soyuz mock-up.

“It’s not a prison or anything,” Tito said last month, sitting in his Star City apartment. “But it’s a far cry from what someone of my living standard would have.”

How many rooms are there in his Pacific Palisades home, by comparison?

“I never even counted them,” he says. “It’s 30,000 square feet on nine acres with a guest house and a pool house, a running track. It’s probably one of the biggest houses in the city.”

Trappings of success aside, Tito insists he’s not “just a wealthy guy who’s looking for kicks.”

He stresses: “I’m not crazy. . . . I haven’t let the success go to my head. I’ve let the success say: Look, let’s take my life in more places. Let’s make life more fulfilling.”

To be launched from the same pad where Sputnik soared would be especially gratifying, since it was Sputnik that motivated him 43 years ago.

“I could just see myself lying on my deathbed at 90,” Tito says, “and saying, ‘Yeah, what a life. You did it all. You made the full circle.’ ”

There’s nothing wrong with civilians shelling out cash for the opportunity to fly to space, says Alex Roland, a former NASA historian who teaches at Duke University. But to Mir--scene of an intense fire and near-catastrophic collision in 1997 and uninhabited since June? (The fate of Mir appears to be sealed: Russia’s cabinet decided on Nov. 16 to abandon the space station and let it fall into the Pacific in February on its 15th birthday.)

“To think people would line up to pay big money to get on the Titanic like that . . . ,” Roland says. But he calls Tito’s “an open contract among consenting adults.”

Astronaut Supports Venture

NASA astronaut Ken Bowersox, who served as the backup for international space station skipper Bill Shepherd, considers it money well spent.

“It’s not like the money is just going to waste,” Bowersox notes. “That money is going to go into the space program, and it’s going to pay for people over here, it’s going to pay salaries. . . . He’s supporting the program, and that helps us.”

Some at NASA worry about Tito’s physical ability to handle a space trip. If anything goes wrong, the safety of the entire crew could be jeopardized by this cosmonaut-come-lately.

“He meets the parameters,” Semyonov responds, noting Tito had to pass all the cosmonaut medical tests.

Short, slim and bald, Tito looks years younger than 60. Evidence of a healthy lifestyle is everywhere in his Star City apartment: worn running shoes, whole-wheat pasta, organic tomato sauce, soy protein.

He says he was inspired by John Glenn’s return to orbit at age 77 in 1998: “If he wasn’t too old, I’m not too old.” But he quickly notes, “I’ll be the oldest person to fly the first time. The oldest rookie.”

Tito insists he won’t be shattered if the Russians break their contract and he never makes it to space.

“The way I look at it is, every day counts and every day I’m learning about manned spaceflight. I’m learning about systems. I’m not sacrificing anything in terms of my business. My business is trucking along.

“I’m learning how to be alone. I’m learning how a different society works. I’m meeting astronauts and cosmonauts. I’m living in a spartan environment and learning that I don’t need all this wealth and if I didn’t have this wealth, I’d still be happy.

“Oh, I’ve already won.”

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MirCorp: https://www.mirstation.com

Wilshire Associates: https://www.wilshire.com

NASA: https://https://spaceflight.nasa.gov