A former rocket scientist who made millions in the world of stocks plans to spend a little cash to conquer another frontier -- space.

Dennis Tito, 59, will announce Monday, June 19, in Washington his plans to shell out about $20 million to become the first tourist aboard the Russian Mir space station in 2001.

The move is a feather in the corporate cap of Amsterdam-based MirCorp, which was formed this year to convert the empty Russian space station into an orbiting business park and vacation spot.

Tito was in Moscow on Friday, June 16, and was not available for comment.

"He’s going through a battery of medical tests" in preparation for his trip to the space station, according to MirCorp spokesman Jeff Lenorovitz by telephone from France.

After joining NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, in 1964, Tito developed trajectories for the Mariner 4 mission to Mars and the Mariner 5 mission to Venus.

But he became more enthralled with another cluster of stars, the ones that preside on Wall Street.

Using his scientific experience, he approached the world of finance and paved the way for a lucrative career in investment management consulting.

His company, Wilshire Associates in Santa Monica, California, manages clients with about $500 billion in assets and oversees about $11 billion in pension funds, including the mammoth California Public Employees Retirement System.

The company also has two high-profile financial indexes, the Wilshire 5000 and Wilshire 4500, that are used to measure the performance of a broad variety of investment styles and to act as benchmarks to evaluate the performance of active fund managers.

Tito, who lives in the tony Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, often graces the society pages of local newspapers as a fundraiser for the Republican party and the Los Angeles Opera.

Now he is taking his socializing to new heights.

Launched in 1986, Mir has ensured Russian predominance in long-term human spaceflight and its core block is nearly identical to the Russian-designed Service Module or Zvezda that is to be launched next month on a Russian rocket to the International Space Station (ISS).

The aging Mir station suffered a series of accidents and breakdowns including a terrifying fire and a near-fatal collision with an unmanned cargo ship in 1997.

While the world turned a blind eye on Mir and pinned its hopes on ISS, a group of investors, including Washington telephone entrepreneur Walt Anderson and his space adviser Rick Tumlinson, president of the non-profit Space Frontier, quietly approached the Russians about saving the creaky station.

The Russians had planned to bring Mir out of orbit this summer and send it on a suicide dive through the atmosphere above the Pacific Ocean.

But MirCorp came up with funds for a mission that began April 4. The mission was aimed at performing small repairs and maintenance aboard the Mir to restore it to full service after an eight-month lapse in missions.

On Friday, a capsule carrying Sergei Zalyotin and Alexander Kaleri touched down by parachute at 4:44 a.m. Moscow time near the town of Arkalyk in the former Soviet republic after a three-and-a-half-hour descent, Mission Control spokesman Valery Lyndin said.

The cosmonauts confirmed that Mir is in good working order.

Instead of a funeral at sea, Mir may have a second life as the next hot vacation spot or the world’s highest-flying commercial lab.