What did Anousheh Ansari pay millions of dollars to do recently?

Answer 1

Anousheh Ansari paid 20 millions dollars ( or 25 million dollars) recently for a tour visit to the International Space Station. She became the first woman to pay for a trip to space with herself as the prime crew. She is the fourth person to pay a purported 20 million dollars for this space adventure. United States entrepreneur ( Iranian-American) 40-year-old engineer who made her millions in the US telecoms sector, Ansari is designated as the "First Female Space Tourist".

She undrewent 6 months traning and had been quarantined since September 2 in Baikonur, Kazakhstan prior to this trip. On Sept. 18, Ansari launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan aboard the Soyuz TMA-9 capsule with Expedition 14 commander U.S. astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria and flight engineer Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin which docked at ISS on Sept. 20. The 10-day trip was completed with the landing of Soyuz TMA-8 spacecraft at the steppes of Kazakhstan with ISS Expedition 13 commander Pavel Vinogradov and flight engineer Jeffry Williams on September 28, 2006.

The 40-year-old Iranian-born Dallas suburbanite, who sometime signed her entries "Space Cadet", Ansari was originally a backup for Japanese space tourist Daisuke Enomoto, who was paying an estimated $20 million for an ISS trip under an agreement between Russia’s Federal Space Agency and the Virginia-based firm Space Adventures. Ansari took Enomoto’s place after he failed a preflight medical check.

During the week-long ISS crew swap, this US national, who emigrated from Iran at age 16 , Ansari has performed a series of biomedical experiments for the European Space Agency and enjoyed her trip in space and describes the space like a "burned almond cookie.''

A long-time supporter of private human spaceflight, Ansari had been interested in space and human spaceflight Ansari that her and other members of her family helped sponsor a $10 million competition named "Ansari X Prize" in 2004 building a reusable manned spacecraft. The family had recently launched their Texas-based Prodea firm and agreed to partner with Space Adventures to develop the tourism firm's Explorer spacecraft for suborbital flights from Singapore and the United Arab Emirates.

Anousheh Ansari, born on September12 ,1966 in Iran is the co-founder and chairman of Prodea Systems, Inc. Her previous business accomplishments include serving as co-founder and CEO of Telecom Technologies, Inc. (TTI). She emigrated to the United States in 1984. She received her Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering and computer science at George Mason University and her master's degree at George Washington University. She worked at MCI, where she met her future husband whom she married in 1991. She received various honors and awards particularly related to her businesses. She is fluent in English and French as well as her native Persian and had also aquired a working knowledge of Russian for her recent space mission.

Previous space tourists were: US entrepreneur Denis Tito reportedly paid 20 million dollars to become the first space tourist in 2001, South African Mark Shuttleworth in 2002 and Greg Olsen of the United States in 2005.♥

Answer 2

DALLAS, Texas (AP) -- Since long before leaving her native Iran as a teenager in 1984, Anousheh Ansari stared at the stars and dreamed of traveling closer to them.

Now at age 40, after an improbable journey that's included learning a new language, earning an engineering degree and starting a telecommunications company that made her rich, this Dallas businesswoman will become the first female space tourist on a Soyuz spacecraft that lifts off Monday.

"I've always been fascinated with space and always wondered about the mysteries of space and wanted to be able to experience it firsthand," she said in a telephone interview from the launch site at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. (Watch Anshari prepare for her lifelong dream -- 2:42)

She says she is eager to see Iran from space -- she hasn't been back since emigrating to the United States -- and hopes to inspire girls in her homeland to study science. Ansari says she's received e-mail messages from many of them, although her flight has received scant attention in Iran. She is, after all, an American citizen.

Ansari and her family left Iran a few years after the Islamic revolution, in part because the opportunities for a young girl to study science were becoming limited there.

Her space ride will cost about $20 million. Ansari can afford it because she and her husband sold their company in 2000 for about $550 million in stock from the acquiring company.

The extent of the couple's wealth is not entirely clear, because the stock fell in value. That led shareholders of the takeover company to sue Anousheh Ansari and several others for alleged insider trading. The case is pending in a Massachusetts federal court.

This isn't the first time she has dipped into her personal fortune to spend on space.

In 2002, she helped pay a $10 million award for the first successful privately financed manned trip into space. SpaceShipOne, backed by Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen, claimed the Ansari X Prize by making two flights to the edge of space more than 60 miles above California's Mojave Desert.

Ansari hopes both the X Prize and her trip to the international space station will foster more interest in space travel -- and lower prices if she helps spur more private companies to join the space-tourism race.

Her husband, Hamid, said she believes space travel will be critical one day, when humans deplete Earth's resources and need to colonize space.

Answer 3

go into space. she was the first female space tourist.