Dennis Tito

American multimillionaire businessman. Before moving into a highly successful business career, he was a rocket scientist at the US space agency NASA's jet propulsion laboratory in Pasadena, CA. On 28 April 2001, he made history as the world's first ‘space tourist’, having completed nine months training for the mission at a military base near Moscow. Paying a reputed $20 million (£14 million) to the Russians, he boarded a Soyuz spacecraft, along with two Russian cosmonauts, and was launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan for his 6-day stay aboard the International Space Station (ISS). His return flight landed successfully in the Kazakhstan desert on 6 May 2001. In 2004 he returned to Russia to back development of C-21, a craft capable of taking up to five fare paying passengers into space. In April 2002, South African millionaire businessman Mark Shuttleworth became the world's second space tourist when he blasted off from Baikonur for a short stay at the ISS. The first woman tourist was Anousheh Ansari, a forty-year-old Iranian-born former telecom tycoon who took off from Baikonur on 18 Sep 2006 for a two-week stay at the ISS.

Dennis Anthony Tito (born August 8, 1940 in Queens, New York) is a United States multimillionaire who gained celebrity status by becoming the first space tourist to pay for his own ticket, although he himself opposes being called "tourist" and asks to be called an "independent researcher" since he performed several scientific experiments in orbit.

Through an arrangement with space tourism company Space Adventures, Ltd., Tito joined Soyuz TM-32 on April 28th, 2001, spending 7 days, 22 hours, 4 minutes in orbit, and docked with the ISS.