Why is an opera singer going to the ISS?
It's been a weird life for Sarah Brightman, starting out as a dancer before recording one-hit wonder I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper, later reinventing herself as a classical soprano. Now, if you recognize the name, it's probably because she sang the duet to Time To Say Goodbye, more commonly known as the "opera song" that played repeatedly during season two of The Sopranos. Now, however, the 54-year old is going to the International Space Station to become the first recording artist to perform in space, at a personal cost of anything up to $30 million.
According to Roscosmos, Brightman will stay on the Russian portion of the ISS between September 1st and 11th, and plans to sing live while accompanied by an earthbound orchestra. According to the singer, her desire to become a space tourist began when she saw the first moon landings in 1969. She told the Daily Mail that the event opened her mind "to what you could do as a human being" and it was at that moment that "something flipped inside me." It's also not much of a publicity stunt since her last album, Dreamchaser, was released back in 2013. It's not too much of a stretch, therefore, to believe that the singer is actually a bigger space geek than any of us would have believed.
She'll spend the next six months undergoing strict cosmonaut training at Star City, and if the flight is successful, she'll become the eighth private individual to stay aboard the ISS. Oh, and if there's a half-remembered news story about Lance Bass going to space lodged somewhere in your subconscious: the singer never finished the training, which was probably lucky given his subsequent account of what took place.
But what if you fancied joining that rarified group of individuals who have taken to space on their own dime? Firstly, you probably need to be rich enough that news stories replace your first name with the word "multimillionaire." That's because the price of a 10-ish-day trip to the heavens will set you back anything between $20 million, the figure that Dennis Tito reportedly paid back in 2001, all the way through to the $35 million fare Cirque du Soleil CEO Guy Laliberté was rumored to have paid for his trip in 2009. Some reports, however, have pegged the figure closer to $52 million -- which would clean out the singer's reported fortune. You'll be writing a check to Space Adventures, the company that, so far, has handled every private trip to the ISS.
Next, there's six months of rigorous training at Russia's Star City complex outside Moscow, involving psychological testing and scientific training, as well as an emergency landing and survival course -- not to mention having to learn Russian. Given Lance Bass' account of his time at the facility, it would also help if you weren't a member of the LGBT community since the country can be a pretty unforgiving environment in places. After that, of course, you actually have to be strapped into a Soyuz rocket and fired into space, so let's hope that Brightman isn't the sort to get queasy on a rollercoaster.
[Original image credit: CD&LP.com]
