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Russian space agency to allow tourist to spacewalk for the first ever time

Friday 26 June 2020 15:46 BST

NASA astronauts Anne McClain (R) and Nick Hague are seen during Friday's spacewalk in this social media photo from the International Space Station posted on March 25, 2019 (NASA/Reuters)

Russia will allow a tourist to conduct a spacewalk for the first ever time.

The customer is expected to walk out into the void of space from the International Space Station in 2023.

They will go out from the Russian segment of the station, and be accompanied by a professional cosmonaut, the space agency said.

Some seven people have flown to the International Space Station as tourists, with one going twice. The last of them was the co-founder of Cirque du Soleil, Guy Laliberté, who went in 2009.

The space agency has already said it will take two new non-professional astronauts to the floating laboratory before the end of 2021. The trip to spacewalk is separate from that previously announced journey.

All of those trips will be conducted as a tie-up between Russia’s state space agency, Roscosmos, and the US-based Space Adventures. The two worked together to take the first space tourist to the station, in 2001.

The cost of the trip is yet to be confirmed.

The official announcement also made no mention of how the tourist would train, or what they would do while floating out in space. A spacewalk is considerably more laborious than the already tough journey into space, requiring extra work both on the ground and during the journey itself to ensure the safety of any astronaut.

Nasa's groundbreaking decade of space exploration: In pictures

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1/10Nasa's groundbreaking decade of space exploration: In pictures

Nasa's groundbreaking decade of space exploration: In pictures

Mystic Mountain, a pillar of gas and dust standing at three-light-years tall, bursting with jets of gas from fledgling stars buried within, was captured by Nasa's Hubble Space Telescope in February 2010

Nasa/ESA/STScI

Nasa's groundbreaking decade of space exploration: In pictures

The first ever selfie taken on an alien planet, captured by Nasa's Curiosity Rover in the early days of its mission to explore Mars in 2012

Nasa/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

Nasa's groundbreaking decade of space exploration: In pictures

Death of a star: This image from Nasa's Chandra X-ray telescope shows the supernova of Tycho, a star in our Milky Way galaxy

Nasa

Nasa's groundbreaking decade of space exploration: In pictures

Arrokoth, the most distant object ever explored, pictured here on 1 January 2019 by a camera on Nasa's New Horizons spaceraft at a distance of 4.1 billion miles from Earth

Getty

Nasa's groundbreaking decade of space exploration: In pictures

An image of the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy seen in infrared light by the Herschel Space Observatory in January 2012. Regions of space such as this are where new stars are born from a mixture of elements and cosmic dust

Nasa

Nasa's groundbreaking decade of space exploration: In pictures

The first ever image of a black hole, captured by the Event Horizon telescope, as part of a global collaboration involving Nasa, and released on 10 April 2019. The image reveals the black hole at the centre of Messier 87, a massive galaxy in the nearby Virgo galaxy cluster. This black hole resides about 54 million light-years from Earth

Getty

Nasa's groundbreaking decade of space exploration: In pictures

Pluto, as pictured by Nasa's New Horizons spacecraft as it flew over the dwarf planet for the first time ever in July 2015

Nasa/APL/SwRI

Nasa's groundbreaking decade of space exploration: In pictures

A coronal mass ejection as seen by the Chandra Observatory in 2019. This is the first time that Chandra has detected this phenomenon from a star other than the Sun

Nasa

Nasa's groundbreaking decade of space exploration: In pictures

Dark, narrow, 100 meter-long streaks running downhill on the surface Mars were believed to be evidence of contemporary flowing water. It has since been suggested that they may instead be formed by flowing sand

Nasa/JPL/University of Arizona

Nasa's groundbreaking decade of space exploration: In pictures

Morning Aurora: Nasa astronaut Scott Kelly captured this photograph of the green lights of the aurora from the International Space Station in October 2015

Nasa/Scott Kelly

Only one of the two people who will take part in the journey will go on the spacewalk, Roscosmos said.

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