Canada's Cirque du Soleil chief heads for the stars

Guy Laliberte, the larger-than-life Canadian entrepreneur behind the Cirque du Soleil phenomenon, announced Thursday he would fulfil a childhood dream by becoming the seventh space tourist.

Laliberte, 49, whose dramatic reinvention of the circus has netted him a 2.5-billion-dollar (1,76 billion-euro) fortune, described his journey into space, planned for September 30, as a "poetic, social mission."

Speaking from Star City, in Russia, he said the social dimension would be represented by his One Drop foundation, which works to improve access to water resources and to raise awareness of water-related issues.

As for the poetry -- apart from the simple fact of fulfilling his childhood dream -- he would be composing a poem in collaboration with Canadian poet Claude Peloquin, on the theme "a drop, a planet, a message."

"It is an artistic project with the poet," he said. "We will have to look at ways of broadcasting it," he added.

Laliberte is to join the crew of a Soyuz space ship for a September launch to the International Space Station, becoming the seventh space tourist to rocket into orbit. He will spend 12 days at the station.

While Laliberte did not want to tell reporters how much his space mission would cost him, he conceded it was not a million light years away from the 35 million dollars (25 million euros) paid by the last space tourist, US software pioneer Charles Simonyi.

Private citizens are charged 20 million dollars for such space trips, plus another 15 million dollars if they wish to step outside their capsule for a brisk space walk, according to Canadian media.

He will also have the right to perform certain experiments while up there, but for the moment, he said, he had not decided what they would be.

Laliberte will travel up to the station in a Russian spacecraft, accompanied by Russian cosmonaut Maxime Surayev and US astronaut Jeffery Williams.

Since May 10 he has been following the obligatory pre-flight training for cosmonauts at Star City and has passed all his medicals. "They told me I had a heart of a cosmonaut," he said smiling.

Laliberte said he was first inspired by the idea of travelling in space by the 1967 Universal Exhibition in Montreal: it was the Soviet space pavilion that captured his imagination, he said.

Like his predecessors, Laliberte's space mission was organised by US-based space tour operator Space Adventures.

The company had suggested at the beginning of 2009 that Simonyi might be the last space tourist for some time.

The ISS staff doubled at the end of May to six and the United States is preparing to take its space shuttles out of service, all of which left space on board the Soyuz rockets.

But Laliberte has booked his place, and according to Space Adventures, Google billionaire Sergey Brin has lodged his own request for a flight.

A former street performer, Laliberte in 1984 turned a small acrobatic troupe into a global entertainment empire that now employs 4,000 people and generates 800 million dollars in ticket and merchandise sales annually.

Born in Quebec, he is now ranked the 261st richest man in the world by Forbes magazine.