WASHINGTON, June 26 – The first people to travel as passengers on a commercial spaceflight will likely be wealthy daredevils, Joan Vernikos, NASA’s director of life sciences, said at a conference here Monday.

"I believe that the first group of tourists who will go up there are the risk-takers -- the people who will pay a lot of money to suffer," she said.

Speaking at "Going Public 2000," a conference sponsored by the Space Transportation Association (STA) to encourage the development of travel and tourism in outer space, Vernikos said that the establishment of medical standards for civilian spaceflight should take precedence over providing amenities for the pioneers.

Vernikos chairs an STA committee that is trying to develop health and safety regulations for spaceflight that will ensure the security of passengers while not impeding the growth of the nascent commercial space travel industry.

Of course, she said, the most important thing for safety engineers to do is keep the passengers alive and well. They should pay special attention to the environment aboard the spacecraft.

"From our experience at NASA, most of our crises happen from some environmental event," she said, citing the purity of drinking water and the correct mixture of gases in the spacecraft as areas that safety engineers should pay special attention to.

The government and space tourism companies should also work together to construct a database of medical information from space travelers to learn how average humans respond to space travel, Vernikos said. That database could become the focus of a conference of medical issues surrounding commercial passenger spaceflight.

"That could, in fact, be a big help in helping us move forward on this issue," she said.