Circus founder takes comic touch into space

When Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberte flies as the latest tourist to the International Space Station (ISS) next month, he promises to bring a comic touch to the mission.

Already his screen saver pictures his mission colleagues -- US astronaut Jeffrey Williams and cosmonaut Maksim Surayev -- in space suits and red clown noses, and he says he will bring six more clown snouts to those now in orbit.

"Fun at work, it's already mission accomplished!," the Canadian billionaire enthused in an interview with AFP, taking a break from a three-hour training session in a model of the cramped Soyuz rocket, on which the crew will blast off from Kazakhstan's Baikonour cosmodrome on September 30.

At the Soviet-era motel that houses cosmonauts in training here at Russia's space base outside Moscow, Quebec-native Laliberte has decorated his room with a poster of cult comic-book character Tintin walking on the moon and snapshots of his family.

The former fire-eater and stilt-walker, who left home at 14, said he sees this next adventure to space as a lesson to his five children -- too used to luxury -- that "to realize your dreams, you have to work hard!"

But the itch to fly to outer space, he admitted, came also because at 50 years old, "I had started to miss the notion of adventure."

Worries of succumbing to space sickness felt by many astronauts during their first 24 to 48 hours in zero gravity, gave him his only moment's pause, he said.

An eternal dreamer with a keen business sense, a broad smile and a shaved scalp seems to breath truth into such proverbs as "dreams can come true."

Still a teenager and with only 50 dollars in his pocket, Laliberte left home at 18 for France, where he learned to busk, doing stilt-walking and fire-breathing for tips on the streets of European cities.

Back in Canada, Laliberte went from pauper to circus mogul by turning a troupe of ragtag street performers in 1984 into a global entertainment empire.

Now Laliberte is the 261st richest man in the world, with a personal fortune valued by Forbes at 2.5 billion dollars (1.76 billion euros).

For this last frontier mission to space, Laliberte reportedly laid down 35 million dollars.

"Like any other little boy, I always -- in many different ways -- dreamt of going to space," he said, recalling the first pangs he felt as a boy watching television images of the first man on the moon in 1969.

"I was 10 years old, in summer camp, the camp counsellor brought in an old black-and-white television and we spent the whole night watching the event," said the showman.

But in his months-long training, Laliberte admits he did not take well to the mandatory Russian-language classes. Too academic an approach, complained the bilingual entrepreneur who quit school at 15.

"I'm not interested, it's not really my thing," he summed up dryly.

Neither will Laliberte conduct any scientific experiments, breaking with the tradition of previous space tourists, preferring to live his experience more viscerally.

"I am not a scientist," he avows. Rather, it will be a "feast for the eyes" and a chance "meditated while staring at the stars."