Private space station planned

MOSCOW -- A partly Russian-owned company that once tried to bail out the Mir space station announced a plan Tuesday to launch a private space station for paying tourists. \nThe new orbiter, called Mini Station 1, will cost about $100 million and is expected to enter orbit in 2004, said Jeffrey Manber, president of the Netherlands-based MirCorp. \nHe said it would be manufactured by the Russian RKK Energia company, which designed and built the Mir and owns a majority stake in MirCorp. The rest belongs to private investors. \nRussia's increasingly troubled Mir was taken out of orbit in March after a 15-year career. MirCorp leased the Mir from Energia and paid for a cargo ship and a 73-day manned mission there in 2000, but the Russian government later dumped the station, saying that MirCorp had failed to provide enough funds to keep it in orbit. \n"We don't have the problems that we had the first time," Manber said in a telephone interview. "We don't have an old space station with a poor image and we are able to start a new one here." \nManber said MirCorp has several customers willing to pay for a ride on the new station, and their contributions would help build it. \nIn April, California multimillionaire Dennis Tito became the world's first space tourist, paying about $20 million to ride a Russian rocket to the new International Space Station. His trip vexed the U.S. space agency NASA, which said commercializing the ISS would hamper the crew's work. \nManber said he had told NASA about MirCorp's plans. \n"I have been briefing NASA on every step, and I believe they view us as a good development," he said. "The ISS is for science, and the Mini Station will be commercial." \nManber said the new space station would be slightly bigger than the Russia's Soyuz space capsule and could accommodate three visitors on visits of up to 20 days at a time. \n"The Mini Station is simply a place to live and work for two or three weeks," he said. "This is an inexpensive platform." \nManber said MirCorp had already signed an agreement to build the station with Energia and the Russian Aerospace Agency, the Russian government's space agency. \nBut Russian Aerospace Agency spokesman Konstantin Kreidenko said Tuesday that the document signed was merely a declaration of intent to work together to explore commercial space projects. \n"It's too early to speak about specific details yet," he told The Associated Press. \nUnder MirCorp's plan, Soyuz capsules that ferry crew members to the International Space Station could dock at the private station and then continue on to the ISS. Manber said the scheme would help Russia finance construction of its capsules and fulfill its obligations for the ISS. \nKreidenko said that plan is only theoretical and would require the consent of all 16 nations involved in the International Space Station.