The eccentric financier, who is stumping up 20 million dollars for the privilege of a 10-day trip to the International Space Station (ISS) says he has been dreaming of making a cosmic flight since an early age.

"Three months is not a long time to realise a dream after waiting so long. I have been fascinated by space since a teenager," he told AFP, speaking by telephone from Star City outside Moscow where he began his latest mission training on February 4.

"It means a tremendous amount to be on this Earth for 60 years and finally have the chance to look back and see the entire globe. That has to be one of mankind's greatest adventures," Tito added.

The businessman is scheduled to blast off to the new international outpost on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft from the Baikonour cosmodrome in Kazakhstan with astronauts Talgat Musabayev and Yuri Baturin on April 30.

The retired NASA aerospace engineer, the world's first "space tourist," said that he is blazing a trail for space travel that could see ordinary people flying across the universe like they do on aeroplanes today.

Like air travel in its infancy, only a few rich individuals will be able to afford trips to space at the beginning. But within a 100 years or so, it could become accessible to the average person, according to Tito.

"It is a natural human desire to venture into new frontiers. We will see more people following in this direction, individuals who can afford it. But within 100 years there could be aerospace planes flying from Paris to Sydney in one hour," he said.

The company which struck the deal for him, US-based Space Adventures, says it would like to find others like Tito with deep enough pockets to fulfil boyhood dreams of space travel and make the flight of a lifetime to the ISS.

But in the meantime, it has a number of clients lined up who are ready to pay 100,000 dollars to make suborbital flights on Russian spacecraft at an altitude of 100 kilometres (60 miles).

"An average person can afford this easily," said Sergei Kostenko, the Russian representative of the company.

Tito, who spent several days earlier this month in a Moscow hospital suffering from a bout of pneumonia, insisted he was prepared physically for the rigours of the space journey.

"I'm trim and lean. I'm in better physical shape than most 30-year-olds. I've been running for 20 years and working out in the gym for the last five years. I can run five kilometres (three miles) in under 25 minutes and not many people can do that," he said.

And Tito said he was not apprehensive about the dangers of blasting off from Planet Earth.

"It's the same risk as any cosmonaut takes when they fly into space. It's much less than the risk of mortality inherent for someone of my age," he commented.

Tito, Musabayev and Baturin are planning to arrive at the ISS on May 2 on a mission to deliver a fresh Soyuz spacecraft that will provide station crews with a lifeboat should a crisis require an emergency return to Earth.

There they will meet up with US astronaut William Shepherd and Russian cosmonauts Sergei Krikalyov and Yury Gidzenko, who have been on board the space station since November 2 on the first manned mission to the ISS.

Tito's original plan to make a space flight to the ageing Mir space station fell through when the cash-strapped Russian government decided to destroy the nearly 15-year-old orbiter in early March, dropping it into the Pacific Ocean.

All rights reserved. � 2001 Agence France-Presse. All information displayed on this section (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.

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