Woman space flier looks far, far ahead

Alan Boyle Science editor • Profile • E-mail

The first woman to buy a ride to the international space station says she wants her flight to serve as an inspiration for expanding the final frontier — an expansion that extends even to orbital toilets.

Anousheh Ansari, who was born in Iran but made her mark as an telecommunications entrepreneur in the United States, is due to lift off in the company of two professional astronauts next Monday aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, for a 10-day trip to orbit and back. Although Ansari's contract bars her from disclosing how much she's paying, the published price tag for a space station flight is $20 million.

She's no stranger to supporting spaceflight with her own money: Several years ago, she and other members of the Ansari family provided financial backing for the $10 million Ansari X Prize, a suborbital space prize that was won in 2004 by the SpaceShipOne rocket team. Now she's a partner in Prodea, the family's venture capital company, which is working with the Russians to develop a new suborbital spaceship for tourist flights.

Ansari, who turned 40 on Tuesday and has described herself as a "liberal Muslim," says she has wanted to travel to outer space ever since she was a girl growing up in Iran. This year, she went through Russian cosmonaut training as a backup to Japanese millionaire Daisuke Enomoto, as part of a deal brokered by Virginia-based Space Adventures.

When the Russians removed Enomoto from the crew for this month's Soyuz flight, due to medical reasons, Ansari found herself in a position to realize her dream of spaceflight much sooner than she expected.

That forced her to make adjustments to her flight plan — and the Russians had to adjust as well. For this flight, the Soyuz's spartan space toilet is equipped with a wider urinal attachment, designed with a woman in mind. (In the past, women cosmonauts reportedly had to use an absorbent pad instead.)

Ansari discussed her space aspirations, the toilet angle and much more on Monday, during a telephone call from her quarters at the Baikonur launch site in Kazakhstan. Here's an abridged version of the interview:

MSNBC.com: You've said that you hope to play a role as a "space ambassador" during this flight. Could you explain that role?

Ansari: The most important part of my role as an ambassador is to educate everyone about space and the importance of space, and space exploration and space sciences. One way I imagine doing this through my trip is by recording every second of my experiences, either through video, pictures or audio — describing my emotions, my activities, my feelings, what I see, what I hear, encompassing all aspects of my experience — and then trying to share that upon my return with as many people as possible. Through this I want to bring awareness to existing activities in space, existing sciences ... and also to share the experience as an individual so people know how it would feel to actually fly to space.

Q: And the aim would be to encourage people to play a role in settling that space frontier?

A: Absolutely. I think it's essential for our species to pay more attention and focus more on advancing our technologies regarding using the resources in space to solve existing problems on Earth, and also to be able to advance our capabilities in space travel so in case our planet does not stay a suitable place to live on, that we will have alternatives. I'm not talking about my lifetime. I'm talking about the long future ahead of us, for our children's children, and their children. But it's something that we have to start right now. There are a lot of issues we need to overcome if we want to be able to travel beyond our solar system, and maybe travel through the galaxy in the long future.

Q: Could you talk about the science program that you're planning? What are the research projects that you're most looking forward to?

A: Well, I was trying to craft some specific projects that I would do when I traveled, thinking that this was not going to happen for one or two years. So the things that I was hoping to do, none of them I was able to actually do for this trip because I only had a short window. There are a lot of certification processes that have to take place before I can take anything up there with me.

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So what I decided to do was to participate in some ongoing programs that the European Space Agency and the Russian Space Agency and NASA are doing. Some of them have to do, for example, with the effects of zero gravity and being in space on lower back pain. A lot of astronauts and cosmonauts suffer from the symptoms of lower back pain when they travel in space. So there's a study that they're doing to figure out when it happens, why it happens and to come up with methods of preventing it. I'm participating in that, and also in studies into how microbes are spread on the space station.

And I'm doing some video of specific experiments that I will use to demonstrate laws of physics, laws of motion — different things that are not easy to demonstrate on Earth, but can be demonstrated in the zero-gravity environment. I'll use those tapes for educational purposes at different schools.

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