Cirque du Soleil’s Canadian founder and majority shareholder Guy Laliberté will fly to the International Space Station (ISS) in September, a spokesman for the entertainment company said on Wednesday.
This spokesman confirmed that Mr. Laliberté, 49, will indeed be the “first Canadian private explorer to travel into space for a philanthropic mission,” which will be unveiled in Moscow on Thursday by the Canadian Space Agency (CSA).
The seventh space tourist, Mr Laliberté, will join the crew of the Soyuz TMA-16 rocket, scheduled for launch next September.
This stay is organized by the American company Space Adventures, which has been commissioned by the Russian space agency to prepare private flights of a Soyuz spacecraft to the ISS.
According to Canadian media, astronaut training and spaceflight costs $20 million and a spacewalk costs $15 million.
Quebec-born Guy Laliberté made his fortune by founding Cirque du Soleil in 1984, a small acrobatic troupe that grew into a multinational entertainment company employing 4,000 people worldwide and whose 2009 revenues would reach $800 million.
Mr. Laliberté’s fortune is estimated at $2.5 billion.
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