Esther Dyson, Space Tourist in Training

Spectrum: What’s the coolest thing you’ve done in the training program so far?

ED: Probably the overnight wilderness training, where three of us spent two days and two nights overnight in the woods, in subzero temperatures. That was to simulate ”an unexpected landing in forested and marshy terrain in winter.” The simulated helicopter rescue was also a lot of fun, but fairly brief. We were picked up, one by one, by a crane, from the side of a water tank and from within it (in our waterproof suits). And experiencing 4 g’s in the centrifuge was a lot of fun; I’ve done it twice so far and would love to do it again. Eight g’s, however, was a bit unpleasant. And of course all the weightless flights, both here and, before I was training, with Zero-G in the United States.

Spectrum: Any personal experiments you’d like to conduct in space?

ED: Fortunately, the experiment-slash-research I do most want to do doesn’t actually require me to be in space. That would be to get all the cosmonauts and astronauts (with their governments’ support, of course) to donate their genetic information and their health records to a medical database. As I said, all of them, plus us ”space tourists,” are probably the healthiest people on the planet to have such extensive medical records. Most people with good medical records are sick, one way or another (with the possible exception of some rich hypochondriacs and perhaps some sports figures). So we would make an excellent control group and could be quite useful to medical research. Also, I’d like to see if it’s possible to find genetic markers for adaptation to motion sickness, bone-density variations, and other kinds of space-related issues.

Spectrum: Why is space tourism a good thing?

ED: It builds a constituency for space exploration, brings money into the space program, helps publicize it, and excites kids about math and science. Already, it is one more sector of the modern economy. Also, it will lead to more productive things such as solar energy capture and asteroid mining, as well as more effective crystal and pharmaceutical production.

Spectrum: If you do go into space, are you worried about the bad stuff that might happen?

ED: To be honest, I’m more scared day to day of slipping on the ice here and breaking my leg. Statistically, that’s far more likely, though of course the consequences of something going wrong in space could be more serious! I have had a long, full life and hope to continue it, but I don’t want to spend the rest of my life worrying about dying; I want to spend it doing interesting, useful things. There are unpleasant parts to it: the adjustment to 0 g , constipation, noise…but they’re trivial compared to the overall experience.

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