Space Tourists

In pursuit of their ultimate dream, more and more multimillionaires are traveling to Kazakhstan and the remote, hidden rocket launch site Baikonur and accompanying training centre, Star City. Here, Russian cosmonauts celebrated their achievements until Gorbachev pulled the plug on the space program in the late 1980s. Nowadays, the doors stick and the money is gone. In order to finance trips into space, the Russians now sell the third seat in the capsule to extremely wealthy Americans, who with a ticket costing $20 million, cover almost half of the cost. American businesswoman Anousheh Ansari is one of these travelers. Space Tourists shows, non-chronologically, how she prepares for the journey by Soyuz rocket to the International Space Station. In the meantime, Magnum photographer Jonas Bendiksen is searching for space debris for a photo series, along with the inhabitants of the neighboring, isolated villages on the steppes. They earn a little extra from the waste, which is often made from the very best materials. They use the titanium tanks as soup pans and sell the rest to China, where it is used to make aluminum. The worlds of the cosmonauts and the shepherds hardly touch at all. And when Ansari returns to Earth, Charles Simonyi, the principal designer of Microsoft Word and Excel, is ready and waiting impatiently for the next flight.—IDFA