Introduction[edit]

Dennis Tito, an American businessman, was the first person to pay for their own trip to space. He popularized the term 'spaceflight participant', hating the connotation 'space tourist' had. He believed it is important to distinguish space travelers from career astronauts. Having established such a successful career, his net worth is said to be $1 billion.

Early Life[edit]

Tito was born on August 8, 1940, in Queens, NY. He graduated from New York University with a B.S. in aeronautics and astronautics in 1962, and graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with an M.S. in engineering science in 1964.

Career[edit]

Tito worked for NASA as an aerospace engineer, where he helped plan and monitor 9 missions to Mars. He worked in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and calculated trajectories for interplanetary probes of the Mariner series. After nearly working for a decade in this field, he began working in finance in 1972, where he helped found the Wilshire Associates investment firm. Dennis has been credited with using mathematical tools to determine financial market risks. This was named the Wilshire aggregate market index which is now used widely in the securities market.

20 years later, he negotiated with Russian space agencies to secure his very own trip to space. By the year 2000, he began training for a mission to reach the Mir space station as a space tourist. He spent months training in Moscow and at the Cosmonaut Flight Training Center in Star City, Russia. The mission was soon cancelled after Russia sabotaged the mission and de-orbited the Mir. On April 28, 2001, Tito was 60 years old when he paid $20 million to fly in the Soyuz TM-32 spacecraft from Baikonur Kazakhstan, spending 6 days at the International Space Station. This mission had some controversy, as NASA believed Tito did not have enough training or preparation for the mission. For this trip he spent 7.92 days in space. He wore "The Sokol", which translates to falcon, spacesuit that was designed in the early 1970s and was meant to protect cosmonauts during launch, landing, and any emergencies. In 2003 he donated this space suit to the Smithsonian Museum.

Dennis Tito

Dennis famously stated "'If you're older, heart attacks happen, strokes happen, whatever. And what are they going to do, transport a corpse back to Earth? That would be very embarrassing for them, and traumatic'" (Wall 2011). The mission ended up being a success, in spite of the chaos surrounding it. According to Tom Shelley, President of Space Adventures, "'The private spaceflight industry did start with Dennis' flight'" (Wall 2011).

Where is Dennis Tito now?[edit]

As of October of 2022, Tito has announced he plans to return to space to travel to the moon at age 82. He and his wife, Akiko, have been planning to travel for one-week on SpaceX's Starship spacecraft. He is quoted to have said to SpaceX: "'I would be interested in going to the moon'" (Kluger 2022). He looks over to his wife who says, "'Yeah, me too'". This appears to be Tito's last space endeavor. He has not publicly said how much this endeavor would cost him. Dennis Tito claims he has been planning this trip for about 20 years, however. If this is true, this means he has been planning his second space trip ever since his first one. This flight will be a roughly week long journey and be a flight around the moon with approximately 10 other passengers. It has not been stated whether or not the other passengers have been chosen or not.

He is surprisingly not the first billionaire to make this "reservation" for a flight around the moon, Yusaku Maezawa, a Japanese fashion tycoon announced in 2018 that he would be buying an entire flight, meaning he could take about eight others as well.