Rob Wilson / 4:56 pm September 18th, 2006

Congratulations to Anousheh Ansari, who has just realised her lifelong dream of travel into space. She has worked hard, trained hard, accepted real risk, and conducted herself professionally to get there.

And in the mainstream media, she’s the first ‘female space tourist’.

Anousheh is no more a ’space tourist’ than someone who summits Everest is a ‘mountain tourist’. If you were to tap a mountaineer on the shoulder and address him as such, you would get a frosty reception (and probably an ice axe handle shoved somewhere painful). Many people pay to be guided up mountains and that does not make them any less mountaineers.

So it irks me that someone who puts in the huge expense and months of training for spaceflight should be labelled a tourist, just because they paid to fly.

Anousheh Ansari is an astronaut. She may not be a professional astronaut like her crew-mates, but she’s an astronaut nonetheless. She should be referred to as such. Anything less is disrespectful.

Having said that, I look forward to the day when there are space tourists for real. When anyone with a couple of thousand dollars and a spare week can put on a Hawaiian shirt, sling a camera round their neck, and buy a ticket to the LEO Hilton with no training or real risk, spaceflight will have come a long way indeed.