Q: Russia’s cash crunch is one reason they want to fly Dennis Tito. Now that NASA needs money. . . .

Goldin: Let's put some boundaries on this. The space station is a $24 billion to $25 billion investment. You could have five Dennis Titos -- that ain’t going to make skoosh of an impact. I’m talking about people coming with real money. We’re not willing to give away the space station at three cents on the dollar. Now, $20 million in the Russian economy has a much bigger impact than $20 million in the American economy. We have one investment in the station -- that’s $100 million by Dreamtime. We are out looking for people.

Right now as we speak, we are looking for people willing to put in about a $60 million investment to put in an X-ray crystallography defraction facility commercially on the U.S. lab. We would love for somebody to go do that. There are a host of things we would love people to do commercially, but when we get down to it we get the same old proposals from dreamers or companies interested in building maintenance instead of real commercial activities. That is not going to help us.

Q: So you don’t see much for NASA in a tourism business, but the Russians do?

Goldin: Hey, by the way, they are a sovereign nation. We have no objection as long as we have agreement on the screening procedures, the training procedures and the operational procedures. Would people visit a hotel when it’s under construction? We have to take a look at the ops (operations) tempo — and I think the Russians are concerned about this too.

There will be times when the ops tempo is not very high that may be appropriate for some tourists to come up. But during time of high ops tempo, when there is a lot of activity going, we don’t have time to hand-hold tourists that don’t have the proper training. We need people to add energy, not just be a tourist, but to be there. I see a time somewhere downstream where maybe a tourist could come up. But keep in mind, it has to be cost justified. For example, the shuttle costs so much a flight. Now you have someone saying I have $10 million or $12 million or $20 million to fly. Just because someone says they have that money to fly, is that reasonable? What’s the right price?

Q: Do you think Tito will fly this spring?

Goldin: I don’t know.

Q: Well, you have a lot to say about it …

Goldin: No, I don't. Contrary to popular belief, there are something like 18,000 employees here and thousands of projects. I delegate authority. I delegated to my staff, Joe Rothenberg, and the team that is negotiating with the Russians. My only condition was that you come up with a commercial plan for tourists to go up to the station that established agreed-upon screening procedures, agreed upon training procedures and agreed upon operational procedures.

When I say "agreed-upon," I mean not just by the United States and Russia, but by all of the partners. You set that standard and once that standard is there, there are no questions. We also have to establish where the training has to be. What kinds of quid pro quo activities are involved. Maybe some will go up on a Soyuz and down on a shuttle. Or if they go up on a Soyuz and down on a Soyuz, we still might have to train them in Houston. They just can’t be trained on a Soyuz. They have to be trained on the station activities.