MOSCOW, April 12. /TASS/. Space tourists will be able to hold research experiments and commercialize their experience by holding online classes, the CEO of Glavkosmos (an affiliate of Roscosmos corporation), Dmitry Loskutov, said in a video linkup Space Tourism - How Soon? on Monday.
Tourists will be able to stage experiments in space biology, medicine and physics, as well as to hold on-line classes for child audiences on the Earth. Upon the end of their mission space tourists will be able to commercialize experiments, the way some astronauts have done already," Loskutov said.
Also, tourists will be able to take pictures and film videos and then upload the content to Instagram, thus expanding their audience.
"Space tourism now costs tens of millions of dollars, but we hope that in several yeas to come the price will go down, as ever more spacecraft will become available. Certain competition is already in progress. We will do our utmost to make our prices more attractive than those of our partners overseas," he stressed.
Loskutov remarked that currently a space tourist’s training program lasted for about four months, but specialists were conducting research into how to reduce its duration.
"We have been trying to figure out how to reduce the training time to let business people, who cannot afford to spend several months away from home, to be trained for the flight well enough. For this reason, we have been trying to reduce the course of training and make it less costly," he said.