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British singer Sarah Brightman passes zero-gravity training for space journey

Sarah Brightman is to fly to the ISS on September 1-11, 2015

© EPA/Miguel Sierra

MOSCOW, April 3. /TASS/. British singer and future space tourist Sarah Brightman has had zero gravity flight this week, her website reports on Friday.

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"Such an incredible week! I did my first Zero Gravity flight and experienced weightlessness! So amazing!" Brightman said. She also posted photos from the Ilyushin Il-76MDK laboratory plane where she has passed weightlessness training to confirm her words.

The plane is a flight laboratory designed on the basis of the serially manufactured Il-76MD transport plane that provides brief near-weightless environments, including lunar and Martian gravity conditions for training astronauts, conducting research.

Sarah Brightman is to fly to the ISS on September 1-11, 2015. She is expected to spend 10 days at the International Space Station. If her plans are realised, she will become the eighth space tourist in history.

Brightman, who starred in Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Phantom of the Opera" and is the world’s best-selling soprano singer with over 30 million of CDs sold, first announced her intentions to travel to the ISS as a space tourist in August 2012.

In 2013, Russia’s Federal Space Agency Roscosmos signed a relevant agreement with U.S.-based Space Adventures Ltd. company to proceed with the superstar’s plans of traveling into space. Tom Shelley, the president of Space Adventures, said last year that Brightman would pay a total of $52 million for her flight on board of the Russian-made Soyuz spacecraft to the ISS, where she plans to spend 10 days as a space tourist with ISS Expedition 45/46.

ISS Expedition 45/46 crew members will include Russian cosmonaut Sergey Volkov and European Space Agency astronaut Andreas Mogensen.

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