Sarah Brightman books flight to space station

Washington: Famed soprano Sarah Brightman has announced that she had signed up, and paid up, to become the next space tourist.

The classical crossover star has already passed medical and endurance tests at the cosmonaut training facility outside Moscow and is expected to blast off on a Russian Soyuz rocket sometime in 2015, ABC News reported. She’s expected to spend about 10 days at the International Space Station. Neither Brightman, nor the company Space Adventures, which brokered her trip, would confirm how much she’d paid for the adventure, but sources said that the price tag was more than 50 million dollars. In an interview after the announcement, Brightman said that going to space was something she had always wanted to do, inspired by the space race she witnessed as a child in the 1960s. “I’ve wanted to go to space, really, since I was a little girl,” she said. She recalled drawing strength and inspiration from the pioneers of space travel, and said she still gazed at the stars when she’s anxious before a performance. Brightman is poised to become the eighth space tourist. The first was American Dennis Tito, who paid 20 million dollars for the honor in 2001. The most recent was Cirque de Soleil founder Guy Laliberte, who in 2009 became the first clown in space. IANS