Space crew in for red noses, tickles

BAIKONUR, Kazakhstan: The man who hopes to be the first clown in space, Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberte, yesterday said he would tickle fellow astronauts as they sleep aboard the International Space Station.

But the impish billionaire says his $35 million excursion into orbit will have a more serious purpose: promoting awareness of the world's growing shortage of clean water.

Laliberte and two astronauts spoke with reporters as they prepared for today's launch in Kazakhstan aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket, appearing behind a glass barrier to limit exposure to disease.

The trip from the Baikonur launch facility to the orbiting laboratory is to take two days.

The 50-year-old Canadian tycoon plans a global broadcast from the space station on October 9 to promote his One Drop Foundation, which seeks to raise awareness of the threat to global water supplies.

The performance - a poem - will be read to the population on Earth in 14 different cities, across five continents, Laliberte said.

"I'll start with the simple idea of reading a poem, which will involve characters like the sun, the moon and a drop of water," he said. "Those characters will then engage in a discussion, which will take the form of a little poetic story that we will read to the population of earth."

Laliberte told reporters he had been tickling his fellow astronauts during training, and planned to tickle them in their sleep aboard the space station.

He has promised to bring each crew member of the Station a clown nose to wear, but plans to take two along for himself: one red, one yellow - "the yellow one I will wear when I am a little grumpy, and the red one I will wear when I am happy and joyful".

"I'm going there with my sense of humor and my belief that even if sometimes in life we have to do hard work, there is always room to keep humor present," he said.

Not all fun and games

Astronauts Maxim Surayev of Russia and American Jeffrey Williams will be crammed into the Soyuz capsule with Laliberte for the launch.

Laliberte's stay on the space station is scheduled to last nine days. Surayev and Williams are due to remain until March, and Williams will take over as commander of the orbiting lab in November.

The coming months will be busy, Surayev said, with the planned arrival of three delivery craft and two US shuttles, as well as around 50 experiments planned.

Recent missions have expanded the space station's capacity, allowing for a permanent population of six. Departure of the current occupants over the next few months, however, will leave Surayev and Williams as the only crew for around three weeks at the end of this year.

"It's a huge station, we're probably going to be losing each other all the time," Williams joked.

AP

(China Daily 09/30/2009 page10)