The Soyuz TMA-9 spacecraft carrying Anousheh Ansari successfully docked with the ISS early Wednesday, and Ansari and her Soyuz crewmates boarded the station a few hours later. As an unbylined post on her space blog notes, she floated into the station weaning an X Prize cap (see this photo of the combined crews on the ISS.)

It’s been a quiet couple of days since Anousheh Ansari’s launch, since she’s had limited communications opportunities while the Soyuz spacecraft she’s flying in is in transit to the ISS. There are a couple items of note:

• One communications opportunity she did have was a rare three-way hookup between the ISS, Soyuz, and the shuttle Atlantis. Despite the high-flying setup, the conversation was pretty banal, limited to some basic greetings and joking among the astronauts. The CBS News/Spaceflight Now account added that Ansari, along with astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria, are suffering from a bit of space sickness but appeared to be in high spirits in the conversation.
• An AFP article notes the varying reactions in the Iranian media to Ansari’s flight. One newspaper criticized state-run TV for focusing too much attention on Ansari, claiming that it “has aroused people’s astonishment”. Another newspaper, though, called her flight “a source of pride for all Iranians.”
• With Ansari pretty much incommunicado at the moment, her blog is featuring a YouTube video of her launch and some comments by Peter Diamandis.

While I’m thinking of it, I’ll mention a couple of personal spaceflight-related articles published yesterday in The Space Review:

• Alex Howerton talks about the importance of simulation and training for future commercial passengers. Such training, he believes, can help people get used to the different physical sensations of such a flight, so they’re not taken by surprise on the actual flight itself.
• I expanded a full-fledged article about the use of the term. As I note, for the time being, for better or worse, we’re stuck with the term “space tourist” whether or not such people act like, or consider themselves to be, tourists.

Alan Boyle of MSNBC reports that the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation (AST) has awarded an experimental permit to Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ secretive suborbital launch venture. The one-year permit allows Blue Origin to begin powered test flights from its facility in West Texas, over 30 kilometers north of the town of Van Horn. As Boyle notes, there was little doubt that Blue Origin would get the permit, since there were virtually no environmental concerns and no local opposition. Blue Origin got the permit even though AST is still working through the rulemaking process for awarding such permits; the office was only granted the authority for such permits at the end of 2004 with the passage of the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act.

NASA TV carried live the launch of the Soyuz TMA-9 spacecraft carrying Anousheh Ansari along with the Expedition 14 crew of Michael Lopez-Alegria and Mikhail Tyurin, and everything looks to be well. The Soyuz lifted off on schedule at 12:09 am EDT (0409 GMT) from Baikonur.

Most of the media’s coverage about Anousheh Ansari’s upcoming flight to the ISS has billed her as the first female space tourist. Or is she? In a NASA Watch entry (perhaps more accurately described as a rant against the “hyping” of her flight), Keith Cowing says no: “The U.K.’s Helen Sharman was the first female space tourist when she flew to Mir in 1991.” The difference is that Ansari is paying for the flight, while Sharman was selected “by lottery” for her flight to Mir as part of a joint effort between the Soviet Union and several British companies.

But was Sharman a space tourist? The problem, here, of course, is that there’s no strict definition of the term, leaving lots of room for latitude. Paying for the flight should not be the primary criterion: on Earth, if someone wins a vacation to Hawaii or Las Vegas, they’re still considered a tourist. Should it be based on what they plan to do while in space? Sharman had a number of activities during her stay on Mir, including tending to experiments, photography, and educational outreach. That doesn’t sound like a tourist. Indeed, British space historian Rex Hall, responding to a question on the FPSPACE mailing list last week about whether she would consider herself the “first woman space tourist”, responded, “I think she would not enjoy that title.”

Then again, Ansari doesn’t consider herself a tourist. Her web site identifies her as the “First Female Private Space Explorer & Space Ambassador” and, among other things, she will be performing several experiments (or, rather, be the subject of several experiments) for ESA during her stay on the ISS. As she put it in a SPACE.com interview:

In a way I take offense when they call me a tourist because it brings that image of someone with a camera around their neck and a ticket in their hand walking to the airport to go on a trip somewhere and coming back to show their pictures. But I think spaceflight is much more than that.

I’ve been training for it for six months. I think if it is to be compared to an experiment or an experience on Earth it probably is closer to expeditions like people who go to Antarctica or people who climb Mount Everest. I mean that requires a lot more preparation, thinking, and studying or appreciation of the environment. So I would probably compare it more to an expedition than I would to a touristy trip to another city.

That attitude seems similar to two of her predecessors, Greg Olsen and Mark Shuttleworth, who engaged in a number of research and educational activities during their trips to the station. (Dennis Tito, though, reportedly seemed more content to be more like a tourist on the ISS, looking out the window while listening to opera.)

So perhaps neither Sharman nor Ansari should be considered the first female space tourist. (Ironically, Cowing, in his NASA Watch post, uses Sharman’s Wikipedia entry to prove his point. That entry, though, doesn’t call Sharman a space tourist, while Ansari’s Wikipedia entry calls her “the world’s first female space tourist”.) Perhaps it’s better to reassess the use of the term “space tourist” in general, although I suspect that the term has caught on enough with the media and general public to make it difficult to come up with alternatives that can supercede it.

While Anousheh Ansari has been billed as the first female space tourist and the first Iranian-born person to fly in space, The Peninsula newspaper in Qatar profiles another prospective space traveler from that region of the world: Pakistani artist Namira Salim, who is one of Virgin Galactic’s founders. She is described in the article as “the first woman from the Middle East and Asia to fly into space on a commercial spaceship”, carefully distinguishing her from Ansari, who is flying on a noncommercial Soyuz. Salim, like Ansari, is an expat: she went to school in the US and now spends her time in Dubai and France.

The article calls her a “sculptor, musician, poetess, astrologist, peace activist and humanist”, but despite her many talents, she doesn’t have much of a presence online: a Google search on her name turns up few references other than articles about her pans to go to space; one of the few exceptions is this older article about her, which we mentioned here back in April.

Some various items about Anousheh Ansari and her upcoming flight:

• On his blog, MSNBC’s Alan Boyle touches upon the sensitive issue of religion and space, including the possibility that she will be able to observe the new moon from the ISS a day earlier than observers on the ground, triggering an early start to the holy month of Ramadan.
• Ansari tells ABC’s Good Morning America Weekend Edition show that not only is she looking forward to the flight (even the cuisine), but also developing a robust space tourism industry afterwards. “There is, absolutely, a lot of money to be made in space tourism and space travel,” she said. “We need innovators for the future to make sure that the space exploration industries flourish.”
• The AP profiles Ansari, discussing in detail how she made the fortune that allows her to afford the trip to space and other space-related investments. It’s not all a happy entrepreneurial success story, though: the article notes that she is facing a shareholder lawsuit, accusing her of insider trading for selling shares of Sonus, the company that acquired her telecom startup, before the telecom market collapse earlier this decade. (The article doesn’t mention that such shareholder suits are common any time a company’s stock tanks, so a suit here may only mean there are disgruntled shareholders.)
• Ansari is also anticipating the Overview Effect. “I’m actually hoping that your point of view will change when you see the Earth from space for the first time,” she said, adding that seeing how “small and fragile” the Earth is “will give us a better sense of responsibility.” Another interesting item: the AFP reports that Ansari “is thought to have paid about 25 million dollars (20 million euros)” for the flight, which would be about $5 million more than the estimated list price for such flights. However, the AFP reporter could have also simply goofed on the dollar-euro conversion.
• The blogger “Dr. Sanity” notes some silly Photoshopping done by the Iranian media, putting a helmet on Ansari’s head, lest her bare head be seen.

Also, Ansari has made one final pre-launch entry on her blog, calling her feeling “a strange mix of excitement and anxiety”. She won’t be posting again until she reaches the ISS; “the internet onboard the Soyuz is not working.”

An Interfax article today reports that Anousheh Ansari’s crewmates on the Soyuz launching late tonight, Michael Lopez-Alegria and Mikhail Tyurin, are impressed with her “professionalism”, as Tyurin put it, during her pre-flight training. “She has easily become part of the crew. One could think we’d been working for years together,” Tyurin added. An interesting comment from Lopez-Alegria:

Lopez-Alegria said he had been critical of space tourism previously, but changed his mind after seeing the serious requirements Roscosmos applied to the candidates and the preparations. Anousheh did a serious and intense job, he said.

(One wonders what Lopez-Alegria thinks of suborbital space tourism, where the requirements will doubtless be much less stringent than orbital flights, but also won’t be piggybacking on regular ISS flights.)

The Interfax article also addresses the Iranian flag controversy, with Ansari saying that the flag she wanted to put on her spacesuit “had nothing to do with politics and only conveyed her personal attitude to the nation and its people.”

The Las Cruces Sun-News reports that the city council will consider a proposal Monday to sell nearly 170 acres (68 hectares) of land near the city’s airport to the Rocket Racing League for $2.3 million. The RRL would also get right of first refusal on an additional 175 acres by the airport as well. The league plans to use the land for the “RRL Industrial Park”, which it calls a “world-class destination for businesses and tourists” and “a sought-after destination for visitors from around the world.”

Something to tuck away in the back of your mind if you’re thinking of heading to Las Cruces in about a month for the X Prize Cup: Two anonymous letters, including one sent to the local newspaper, the Sun-News, threatened random shootings of residents unless city officials pay a ransom. Law enforcement officials are taking the threat seriously, but urged residents to go about their normal business, advice people appeared to be heeding yesterday.