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Aug. 28--Anousheh Ansari has come a long way.
She's traveled across an ocean, mastered a foreign language, scaled colleges and corporations, balanced risks against rewards, jumped into the abyss of private business and amassed an enormous fortune.
Next month, two days after her 40th birthday, Mrs. Ansari says, she will arrive at her life's destination -- space.
Strapped inside a Russian rocket, the telecommunications tycoon from Plano will be the fourth paying customer -- and first woman -- to buy a $20 million ticket out of this world.
"I think space is very, very important for the long-term sustainability and future of the human race," Mrs. Ansari said Friday from Moscow, where she's training for the blastoff, scheduled for Sept. 14.
"I know that may sound like sci-fi movies to some people, but a lot of those movies are based on ... the physics of the universe."
Mrs. Ansari, like most space pioneers, believes the inky-black beyond may offer a rich repository of answers to mankind's most vexing questions -- cancer research, the exploration of alternative fuels, advances in bioengineering.
And like most capitalists, she believes entrepreneurial minds and money will speed innovation. She hopes her flight will inspire others to put their private fortunes to work for public good.
"Right now this is the only way for a private citizen to fly" into space, said the Iranian-born entrepreneur. "I'm hoping the prices will come down. We'll definitely be trying ... to open this up to more companies and making it a more competitive business, and making it more accessible for more people."
A major payoff
In 1993, Mrs. Ansari pitched a plan to her husband, Hamid, that would change the trajectory of their lives. Quit their jobs at MCI, she argued, cash out their $50,000 in retirement funds, and start a telecommunications company.
"We both had to accept the fact that we were taking a huge chance," she said. "The coin could end up on either side. One side could be very good for us, and the other side might not be so good."
Seven years later, they sold the business for $750 million. The money financed Mrs. Ansari's childhood dream.
As a young girl, she spent sleepless nights on the balcony of her home near Tehran, Iran, gazing at stars, the pinpricks of light igniting her imagination.
"Deep down in my heart, I knew I would fly to space," she said, "but the timing was not clear to me."
So in 2001, Ms. Ansari and her brother-in-law Amir plunked down more than $2 million to sponsor an audacious space contest modeled after the $25,000 Orteig Prize, which inspired Charles Lindbergh's solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927.
Named the Ansari X Prize, the challenge offered $10 million to any private company that could build a private rocket ship capable of two manned suborbital flights in two weeks. Iconic aircraft designer Burt Rutan -- who co-piloted Voyager, the first aircraft to fly around the world on a single tank of gas -- won the contest in 2004 with financial backing from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.
"The X Prize was fairly important ... to attracting private money into this and making it a reasonable business opportunity," said John Carmack, the video-game coder behind Doom and Quake, and founder of Armadillo Aerospace in Mesquite. "I'm thrilled for Anousheh. She's put her money where her mouth is."
Mrs. Ansari has a seat reserved on Mr. Rutan's follow-up vehicle, SpaceShipTwo, which is being built with the support of Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic. Those suborbital commercial flights are expected to begin in 2008, for about $200,000 per ticket.
Her big opportunity
But the Plano entrepreneur with a megawatt smile, cover-girl looks and a plucky immigrant life story decided not to wait.
Mrs. Ansari said she "jumped at the opportunity" when Space Adventures, a Virginia company that sells seats aboard Russian spaceships, called in February.
For the last five months, Mrs. Ansari has been training at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston and at Star City near Moscow as the backup to Japanese businessman Daisuke Enomoto. But after he failed a medical test last week, she was bumped into the hot seat on the Soyuz spaceship.
"The Russian space program has a very good record of human spaceflight," she said. "After being here and studying the about the system in detail and learning about all the backup systems ... I have no fear."
The only downside, Mrs. Ansari said Friday, is that she would be unable to clear her personal payload with the Russian Space Agency, including a series of experiments. But the civilian space tourist said she plans to document her trip with a digital voice recorder and video cameras available on the International Space Station.
In her down time, Mrs. Ansari will chat with ham radio operators and maybe even hold a news conference while she's in orbit 220 miles above Earth.
"Unlike the other members of the crew, I will have some free time," said Mrs. Ansari, who will spend eight days in space. "Maybe I will do nothing and enjoy the view out the window."
Her trip in mid-September hinges on the successful launch of space shuttle Atlantis on a mission to the orbiting international laboratory. The American spaceship is scheduled to unhook from the space station before Mrs. Ansari and her two fellow crew members -- commander Mikhail Tyurin of Russia and flight engineer Michael Lopez-Alegria of the U.S. -- dock the Soyuz spacecraft.
The Atlantis launch, scheduled for Tuesday, could be scrubbed entirely this week because of Tropical Storm Ernesto. If that launch is delayed, the Soyuz mission would also be pushed back.
The Russians began selling tickets to the International Space Station in 2001 to raise money for its chronically underfunded space program. American millionaires Dennis Tito and Greg Olsen and South African Mark Shuttleworth have been paying passengers.
If Mrs. Ansari's dream holds, she may be the latest space tourist to slip the surly bonds of Earth again.
"I'm hoping this is not going to be my last spaceflight. I'm hoping it's just my first one," she said. "I will have many more ... with other people who will offer suborbital flight, and maybe even orbital flights."
E-mail sfarwell@dallasnews.com
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Copyright (c) 2006, The Dallas Morning News
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