Singer Sarah Brightman Outbids NASA for Space Tourist s Seat
By GINA SUNSERI
Oct. 3, 2012
What s a rich space tourist to do? If you want to fly in space, seats are harder to find than a flight out of Chicago s O Hare airport during a blizzard. So your only option is to bump an astronaut from a seat on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft going to the International Space Station.
ABC News has learned that singer Sarah Brightman, of "Phantom of the Opera" fame, will be the next tourist in space, sometime in 2014 or 2015. To get her seat she had to pay the Russian space agency more than the $51 million NASA budgets on average to send its astronauts to the station.