CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- Now half-way through his $20 million space adventure, South Africa's Mark Shuttleworth is doing well aboard the International Space Station and showing a keen interest in the crew's science-related activities, the Expedition Four flight team reported Tuesday.
Speaking from orbit to the opening panel session of the 39th Space Congress in Cape Canaveral, space station Alpha crewmembers Dan Bursh, Carl Walz and Yuri Onufrienko said Shuttleworth and his two Soyuz taxi mission colleagues were staying busy on the Russian end of the frontier outpost.
But with each crew following their own jam-packed timelines, the station and Soyuz crews haven't had a lot of time to just float around and chat, Bursch said.
"Just in passing at times we've been asking each other questions about the different experiments," Bursch said about his interactions so far with Shuttleworth. "Certainly he has shown a lot of interest in the different experiments we're doing on board, both medical and the other experiments such as protein crystal growth."
The South African Internet whiz kid, who is 28, was launched into orbit last Thursday from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, along with Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gidzenko and Italian astronaut Roberto Vittori. The trio docked with the outpost last Saturday and are scheduled to undock and head home this Saturday at 8:20 p.m. EDT (0020 Sunday GMT).
Their mission is to ferry up a new Soyuz lifeboat for the station and then return to Earth in the Soyuz spacecraft that has spent the past six months docked to the complex.Because that mission requires only two people, the Russians have been selling the third seat to qualifed space tourists. American businessman Dennis Tito was the first to fly last April. Shuttleworth is the second.
Scorning the "tourist" label, Shuttleworth is taking advantage of his flight to conduct five experiments that deal with studies ranging from stem cells to AIDS. At the same time, Shuttleworth hopes his flight will be an inspiration to students.
The first of several educational events planned for the flight took place Monday night. Using Amateur Radio equipment aboard the station, Shuttleworth spoke to some 250 students gathered at Bishops College in Cape Town, a school he attended in his senior year.
"It is very busy up here on the space station," the hometown hero reported. "There is an enormous amount of equipment and work under way. There are only a few people on the space station to do it, so we have to do everything -- from changing the plumbing to the toilet, to the specific and specialized scientific experiments."
Shuttleworth said his experiments are"proving more difficult than we anticipated," but did not elaborate.
Critics of Shuttleworth, and Tito before him, say the idea of flying tourists to the space station is dangerous and only professional astronauts and cosmonauts that are properly trained should be allowed in space for the foreseeable future.
That criticism certainly was not on the mind of the students, who nevertheless gave Shuttleworth a chance to defend his flight and explain how his experience might help South Africa and its people.
"Im living my own dream here and if I do, I hope, get people to live their dreams and to work towards their dreams, (that) is a very good thing," he said. "We need to think about our future, we need to dream about a better future and I hope that this projects the realization of a dream, even if its by some other people."
Meanwhile, questions about space tourism also were on the minds of those attending the Space Congress at the Raddison Resort at Port Canaveral, a hotel that features a locally well-known waterslide at its tropical-themed pool, and at which all three Expedition Four crewmembers have stayed while visiting or training at Kennedy Space Center.
That prompted one Lockheed Martin employee to ask "How you guys feel about welcoming tourists to the space station and do you think that's the beginning of maybe seeing the Raddison attach a module up there?"
"I don't know if we'll be abe to fit the big water slide onboard here," Walz joked, adding: "What we're seeing here is a different form of commercialization with the opportunity for visitors who are not professional astronauts to come up."
"We'll see people like Mark Shuttleworth, who is self financed, but who has gone out of his way to bring science and other very important activities for South Africa here to space station," Walz said. "I think that this is a good trend as a whole. I think it's going to be a great thing for space."
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