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Russia TV Network Announces Space Tourism Contest
« on: Oct 15th, 2002, 9:26am » |
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http://space.com/news/russia_contest_021009.html
Russia TV Network Announces Space Tourism Contest
By Simon Saradzhyan
Special to SPACE.com
posted: 11:11 am ET
09 October 2002
MOSCOW - Russia's TV1 television channel has struck a deal with the Russian Aviation and Space Agency (Rosaviakosmos) and several Russian space organizations to send a winner of a planned Russian reality TV show to space in 2003.
"We have been closely watching how the saga of organizing flights of space tourists has been evolving and offered to produce a TV project which would demonstrate the space achievements of our country and would give the winner a chance to fly to space," Konstantin Ernest, TV1's general director was quoted in the press release announcing the plan Tuesday.
Rosaviakosmos director general Yuri Koptev also welcomed the pending TV show, according to the press release. "This is a very attractive and promising project for us. We are confident that both we and the Russian television will benefit from this project," Koptev said, according to the press release.
Koptev teamed up with heads of Rocket Space Corporation Energia, Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center and Medical-Biological Research Institute to sign a "pre-contract" with TV1's Ernest Tuesday, according to Rosaviakosmos spokesman Sergei Gorbunov.
This document provides for TV1 to provide an advance payment while other signatories will cooperate to reserve a seat on a three-seat Soyuz crew craft, Gorbunov said in a phone interview Wednesday. A full-fledged contract will be signed in December and it will be worth more than $20 million, he said. Gorbunov said the official value of the contract will be revealed either at the signing ceremony in December or shortly thereafter.
TV1's press release said the show will go on for several years, but didn't specify who would pay for the flight. However, Gorbunov told SPACE.com that TV1 would pay the bill.
Russian officials would not disclose the name of the producer tapped to put together the show, saying only that they are working with a "Western producer."
Sources familiar with the deal, however, said that the producer is Mark Burnett, whose popular U.S. version of "Survivor" is in its fifth season on CBS.
Burnett visited NASA headquarters in Washington last week with Lori Garver, the former NASA official whose bid to visit the international space station this October was derailed when Lance Bass entered the picture.
This is not the first time that Burnett has pursued a space-based reality series. In 2000, Burnett was working with the U.S. broadcast network NBC to produce "Destination Mir", a contestant-based show that would send the winner to Russia's Mir space station. The show failed to achieve critical mass before the Russians, under intense financial and political pressure to abandone the station, deorbited Mir.
Gorbunov said thousands of Russians would be able to apply as candidates with health and age being the prime selection criteria. Those selected would be screened by medics to determine whether they are fit to actually compete. Those found fit would participate in athletic and other competitions until a "small group" would be selected to participate in a televised survival show similar to the television series "Survivor," Gorbunov said.
Two winners of the show would be selected to undergo training at the Gagarin center in the Star City outside Moscow. Upon completion of training one of them would become part of a back-up crew while the winner would be designated to actually fly to space on a Soyuz in October 2003, Gorbunov said.
The Russian space agency has previously priced one ten-day flight at $20 million and only two tourists have so far been able to afford a trip to the International Space Station and back. Previous attempts by U.S. companies to organize a TV reality show and send the winner to space on board of a Russian Soyuz capsule failed due to the lack of funding. However, Rosaviakosmos traditionally charges domestic customers a smaller fee than that paid by foreign clients.
Space News Brian Berger contributed to this report.
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