Lance Bass - Spaceflight Plans

Spaceflight Plans

In August 2002, Bass entered cosmonaut training in Star City, Russia. Bass was originally supposed to be the host of a space competition show to be entitled The Big Mission, in which several contestants would go through rigorous training in order to win a seat on a Russian Soyuz space capsule. However, the game show concept fell apart when the producers of the show decided it would be a much better idea to shoot a documentary of a celebrity actually training and going into space, and airing it on a major network. The producers came up with the idea of using Bass when, while sitting with a friend and discussing the space project, the friend's daughter shouted out, "Lance Bass wants to go into space!" The girl, who was an 'N Sync fan, learned of Bass's lifelong dream of space travel when she read it in an online chat, and suggested Bass to the producers.

In order to be admitted into training, Bass agreed to undergo heart surgery to correct a type of cardiac arrhythmia, which was discovered in 1999 when he collapsed after a concert. After several months of training, Bass received cosmonaut certification and was scheduled to fly into space on the Soyuz TMA-1 mission that was to be launched on October 30, 2002. The capsule was scheduled to fly to the International Space Station and land in a desert in Kazakhstan.

Several months before Bass was scheduled to fly, the original deal to air the documentary about Bass fell through. Bass's camp turned to MTV, who initially agreed to sponsor the trip but then backed out over "payment, insurance, and indemnification issues". Shortly after, all of Bass's other sponsorships fell through, including one sponsor that pulled out because they worried about the image of their brand possibly being tarnished if Bass were to die on the mission. Bass was eventually rejected from the program, and was replaced on the flight by Russian cosmonauts Yuri Lonchakov, Sergei Zalyotin and Belgium’s Frank De Winne.