SPACE.com -- Ticketed Space Tourist Greg Olson Said Rejected by Russians

Greg Olsen, the third fare-paying customer to visit the International Space Station, sits in the cockpit of a Russian jet. Credit: Space Adventures. Click to enlarge.

Greg Olsen, a research scientist and the president and CEO of the New Jersey-based company Sensors Unlimited, Inc., plans to be the third paying visitor to the International Space Station (ISS). CREDIT: Space Adventures. Click to enlarge.

Soyuz taxi crewmember Mark Shuttleworth hugs Expedition Four commander Yuri Onufrienko on May 4, 2002 as final farewells take place before the taxi mission's return to Earth.

American multimillionaire Dennis Tito, 60, (left) following an eight-day space flight which cost him 20 million dollars, safely returned on Sunday to Earth together with his Russian crewmates. Click to enlarge. Credit: Russia

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	Ticketed Space Tourist Greg Olson Said Rejected by Russians By Tariq Malik Staff Writer posted: 01:15 pm ET 23 June 2004

spacetourist_olsen_update_040623

An American researcher hoping to be the next paying visitor to the International Space Station (ISS) won't be making his space tourist trip, Russian space officials said Wednesday.

Greg Olsen, a 58-year-old scientist and entrepreneur, was turned down for health reasons after completing some flight theory training at Star City, home to Russia's cosmonaut training center, a spokesman for Russia's Federal Space Agency told the Interfax news agency.

Olsen would have been the third paying space tourist to the ISS following the flights of Dennis Tito in 2001 and Mark Shuttleworth in 2002. His trip would also have followed the successful flight of SpaceShipOne, which put the first civilian astronaut in suborbital space earlier this week.

The Arlington, Virginia-based space tourism firm Space Adventures, which was brokering Olsen's trip, did not immediately return phone calls to confirm the announcement. Space Adventures also helped broker the Tito and Shuttleworth flights.

Olsen, who heads the Princeton, New Jersey-based optics firm Sensors, Ltd., had planned to pay about $20 million to ride a Russian Soyuz spacecraft to the ISS sometime in April 2005, if not sooner. He reported for training at Star City in April 2004 and had already visited the center twice for medical checks a site tour.

In a March interview with SPACE.com, he said he hoped to spend a total of eight days in space, six of them aboard the space station conducting optics experiments with infrared cameras and studying crystal growth.