Cirque du Soleil founder Laliberte is set to become the first Canadian tourist in space. It seems that nowadays a billionaire business tycoon is no longer worthy of that title without having ventured into orbit and making sure the world knows about it. Indeed, the higher the price the better.
There always seems to be some kind of space race – be it between the Russians and the Americans or amongst the massively rich business magnates of the ultra capitalist world. So many important people want to explore what we know the least about. When all the money one could possibly spend in a lifetime can take you to the depths of the deepest ocean, to the tops of the highest mountains and around the world more times than Palin and Phileas Fogg could dream of, the mega bucks are necessary to take you out of this world.
Following in the giant footsteps of Charles Simonyi, French-Canadian Guy Laliberte will venture into orbit in September as part of a blossoming career ranging from poker playing to entertainment organising and now to space travel. The fun does not end here: Laliberte plans to write poems once weightless and outside of the earth’s gravitational force.
This is not to say that the Quebecois representative is not preparing thoroughly for the trip as he has been at cosmonaut training facilities since May and has been going through a number of medical tests before becoming the seventh private citizen in orbit. The medical tests are not too stringent and almost anybody is welcome to try the Soyuz trip, as long as they have 25 million USD to spare of course.
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