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View Full Version : Blast Off!!!



Matt White
09-13-2005, 08:55 PM
By VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV, Associated Press Writer



STAR CITY, Russia - A U.S. scientist paying $20 million to hitch a ride to the international space station said Tuesday he hoped to do some research in optics and medicine while in orbit, and he had no anxieties about his mission.

Greg Olsen is scheduled to blast off Oct. 1 from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan in a Russian Soyuz ship with cosmonaut Valery Tokarev and astronaut William McArthur. Olsen will visit the space station for a week.

"I don't view it as a risk at all," Olsen, 60, said. "Soyuz has an excellent reputation for safety and reliability."

Olsen said he would bring about 35 relatives, including his 4-year-old grandson, and friends and co-workers to the launch.

Olsen's flight was brokered by Space Adventures Ltd. of Arlington, Va. The company has sent two other tourists to the space station through a partnership with the Federal Space Agency.

Olsen, who has advanced degrees in physics and materials science, made his fortune on optic inventions. He is the co-founder of Sensors Unlimited Inc., a New Jersey company that makes infrared imaging cameras and fiber-optic communications components.

"My background is that I'm a scientist in physics and electrical engineering, so space, obviously, is a very big interest," he said.

McArthur said Olsen's engineering experience makes him a "tremendous asset" for the crew.

Olsen will spend a week aboard the station, orbiting 250 miles above Earth, then return with the current space station crew Oct. 11.

Olsen said he hopes to bring a spectrometer designed by the University of Virginia to look at moisture in agricultural areas on Earth, to study clouds and to conduct medical experiments for the European Space Agency.

"I have absolutely no fears and anxieties," he said. "It's an exciting time for me and I just look forward to the experience."

Olsen's flight was pushed back after Russian doctors found an unspecified medical ailment that since has been cleared up. Olsen was cleared for flight in May.

The cash-strapped Russian space program has sought to supplement scarce government funding with revenues from space tourism. California businessman Dennis Tito paid the agency about $20 million for a weeklong trip to the space station in 2001, and South African Mark Shuttleworth followed suit a year later.

Olsen said he had spoken to each of them, and "they both said to me that whatever I feel now about space I will feel better when I'm up there."