Robot reporter puts a new spin on things Wanted: aggressive war correspondent with interview skills, satellite phone. Mobility required in hostile, rugged terrain. Pay: None. Solar panels a plus. Full report http://smh.com.au/articles/2002/03/27/1017089544419.html AND Stricken by poverty and corruption, 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 it 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 $US2 million ($3.8 million) a head for week-long trips, beginning in 2005. This week it announced its first customer: Wally Funk, a 62-year-old Texan woman who trained with the astronauts in the United States's Mercury program but was not sent into outer space. "When I was rejected by the Mercury program, I knew one day I'd be a paying passenger," she said. 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 says. The reusable rockets InterOrbital is developing can be launched at sea or from a land-based space port. Frank Sietzen, president of the Space Transportation Association, which foresees an eventual space-tourism income of $US10-20 billion a year, said that a ticket income of $US8 million 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 $US20 million." That was the amount paid by the first, and so far the only space tourist, the US millionaire Dennis Tito, last April.
