TINY TONGA LAUNCHES SPACE TOURISM PLAN The tiny (1){A B C D}  South Pacific state of Tonga has always had serious problems  (2){A B C D} money, and so it has always been entrepreneurial. It has sold Tongan passports (3){A B C D} Hong Kong businessmen it sold possible satellite broadcasting locations in space it even officially changed to a different time zone to be the first country to welcome the new millennium. Now Tonga’s latest  (4){A B C D} venture is a plan to become the world centre of space tourism. The Tonga government has made an agreement with a US company to allow it to use one of its 170 islands to launch rockets that will take tourists on week-long trips into space at a cost of US$2 million each. For this price, space tourists receive  (5){A B C D} training in a ‘resort setting’, followed by the holiday of a lifetime orbiting the Earth. Two astronaut pilots and four astronaut tourists will  (6){A B C D}  the trip. However, sceptics say that these budgets are inadequate. Although they predict that space tourism will eventually bring an income of US$10 – 20 billion a year, they calculate that the budget of $8 million per trip will not be enough to pay  (7){A B C D}   the required technology. Comparison with the current space tourism programme suggests this maths may be accurate. To ride the Russian _Soyuz_ (the only tourist ride currently available) costs more than US$20 million per person. However, other people, including one important ex-cosmonaut , criticise the Russian government  (8){A B C D} raising money in this way, even though it uses the money for the space programme. In the ex-cosmonaut’s  (9){A B C D}, it uses up Russia’s agreed quota of space missions without achieving anything. He also believes that these (10){A B C D} tourists would be a danger in a difficult or life-threatening crisis in space.