BlackboardThagard to Aid Civilian Space Travel - Professor Signs on to Advise Company
Dr. Norman Thagard, professor of Electrical Engineering, Director of College Relations and Executive Director of the College’s Challenger Learning Center, a former astronaut, has been hired by Space Adventures to help train civilians planning to travel to outer space.
The company brokered the $20 million deal in April that sent California businessman Dennis Tito to the international space station, filling an empty seat on the Soyuz rocket manned by Russian cosmonauts.
"They don't let these folks go out to the rocket, strap in and go up," Thagard said. "They have to go through a training program." Of Space Adventures' pool of advisers, Thagard is the only one who has trained with the cosmonauts in Star City, Russia, said Tereza Predescu, spokeswoman for the Virginia-based company, which has an office in Moscow.
Thagard joined the College of Engineering after he retired from NASA in 1996. He had trained at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center at Star City for more than a year. He flew to the Mir station on the same Soyuz rocket that Space Adventures' clients use
Right now, such space travel is reserved for the rich "It's mainly people with a large amount of disposable income who can afford to take four to six months for training and conditioning," Predescu said.
One day, Thagard said, space travel should be as ordinary as booking passage on an airline.
"I think that's generally the way things go," Thagard said. "The first people who came to the United States on the old sailing ships weren't tourists, but ultimately that happened, and now it goes both ways. It’s just a question of maturity in a program."
