Contracts signed with space tourists who plan to go to ISS next year - space adventures

Sputnik news and agency radio 02:20 GMT 05.07.2020

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - Contracts have been signed with tourists who plan to go into space on a commercial Soyuz flight to the International Space Station (ISS) in 2021, the Space Adventures company said.

"A contract has been signed with two future crew members for 2021," a spokesperson at the Russian office of the American space tourism company told Sputnik.

In June, Russian Rocket and Space Corporation Energia said it had signed a deal with Space Adventures on taking two tourists to the ISS in 2023. In April, it was reported that two space tourists would fly to the ISS on board the Russian Soyuz MS-20 spacecraft in late 2021.

In February 2019, Russian space agency Roscosmos and US-based company Space Adventures signed a contract to organize the flight of two space tourists to the ISS before the end of 2021.

Some files obtained by Sputnik indicate that the launch of the Soyuz MS-20 spacecraft with two tourists and a Russian cosmonaut as the crew commander is planned for December 2021. Their return to Earth is scheduled for January 2022.

In March, Pavel Vlasov, the head of the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre, told Sputnik that Space Adventures had not provided them with information about the two tourists yet.

Roscosmos and Space Adventures have been cooperating in space tourism since 2001, when the first space tourist, Dennis Tito, went into orbit. Since then, a total of seven people have been in space under the space tourism program.