Tonga opens a gateway to space tourism

Stricken by poverty and corruption, the tiny South Pacific state of Tonga has always been forced to be entrepreneurial.

It has sold passports to Hong Kong businessmen, claimed ownership of sought-after satellite broadcasting locations in space, and officially switched time zones to be the first country to welcome the new millennium.

Now the Arthur Daley of the international community plans to establish itself as the hub of the potentially lucrative market in space tourism.

InterOrbital Systems, a Californian company, says it has reached agreement with the Tongan government to use one of the 170 islands, Eua, to launch rockets taking tourists into orbit at a cost of $2m (£1.4m) a head for week-long trips, beginning in 2005.

Yesterday it announced its first customer: Wally Funk, a 62-year-old Texan woman who trained with the astronauts in America's original Mercury programme but was not sent into outer space.

"When I was rejected by the Mercury programme, I knew one day I'd be a paying passenger," Ms Funk told Reuters.

Her ticket buys 60 days of training in a "resort setting", followed by the holiday of a lifetime in InterOrbital's Neptune Orbital Spaceliner craft.

"It will be capable of placing two astronaut-pilots and four astronaut-tourists into ... orbit for a period of up to seven days," InterOrbital's literature says.

But Frank Sietzen, president of the Space Transportation Association - which foresees an eventual space-tourism income of $10-20bn a year, said that a ticket income of $8m a flight was unlikely to pay for the required technology.

"The only viable space tourism at the moment is riding the Russian Soyuz, and the price for that is more than $20m," he said. That was the amount paid by the first and so far the only space tourist, the American millionaire Dennis Tito, last April.