British soprano Sarah Brightman has arrived in Moscow to begin training for her October sight-seeing trip to the International Space Station (ISS), but officials at the Yury Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center unexpectedly delayed the start of her training to sometime next week, Interfax reported.
Brightman has paid an undisclosed sum of money for her trip, which will last 10 days. NASA pays around $70 million a seat aboard Russia's Soyuz spacecraft to send its astronauts on six-month missions to the station.
The singer, who is said to be worth over $50 million, will spend the next nine months in training for her flight. The normal training period for ISS crews is around two years after being assigned to a flight.
Brightman will become the eighth so-called space tourist to pay her way into space aboard the Russian Soyuz spacecraft, currently the only means of transporting humans into orbit. The last person to buy a ticket was Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberte, who paid a reported $35 million for an 11-day trip.
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