Cirque du Soleil Billionaire Will Be Canada's First Space Tourist

by Deidre Woollard (RSS feed)
Jun 6th 2009 at 8:01AM

Energetic Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberte will Canada's first space tourist. Laliberte will head into space in September aboard a Soyuz rocket headed for the International Space Station. Laliberte was #269 on the Forbes billionaire list this year and has a net worth of approximately $2.5 billion. He has traveled the world with his roving troupes and has permanent shows in Las Vegas at several of the top casino resorts, Walt Disney World in Florida, and next year in Dubai.

He will spend around $35 million from his personal fortune and has been training and undergoing medical exams in Russia for the past few weeks. He plans to use his 13-day trip to space to send a message about the importance of providing access to clean water for all. He created the One Drop Foundation back in 2007. He plans to bring up a poem that he is writing with a friend and the consummate showman is planning on what he calls "an artistic production project, an original one, I hope, that will surprise, will entertain and will achieve the goal of communicating in a massive way this poem, which will be a poem to planet Earth and its inhabitants, with regard to the situation of water in the world."

Tags: cirque du soleil, CirqueDuSoleil, guy lailberte, GuyLailberte, space tourism, space tourist, SpaceTourism, SpaceTourist