He's got no ticket to ride to international station

Someday, perhaps, people will be able to buy a ride on a space ship.
But not this April 30th. Not even for $20 million.
NASA is perfectly right to tell the Russians that hitchhikers aren't welcome on rockets to the international space station.
Last week, California millionaire Dennis Tito showed up at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston with four Russian cosmonauts for a week of training preparatory to an April 30 flight to the international space station now orbiting about 250 miles above earth.
NASA said the cosmonauts were welcome, but not Tito. All walked.
The plan: Russia is planning on financing in part its participation in the cooperative space program by selling empty seats on its Soyuz rockets. NASA and 12 other partners in the venture have one word for Russia's unilateral action to book commercial flights to space: Nyet.
This puts Russia in a tight spot, since it agreed to sell the 60-year-old Tito a ticket for $20 million.
Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service reports that the other partners in the international space station all agree that it is too early to be sending nonessential passengers to the space station. At this stage in the station's evolution it is a place only for professionals.
Tito's visit would come less than a week after shuttle Endeavour's April mission to the station, when astronauts are scheduled to install a robot arm on the outside of the station.
Tito's lack of training -- even though he did work in the U.S. space program before entering a successful career in the private sector -- would jeopardize the safety of the other astronauts.
The Russian mission calls for the docking of a fresh Soyuz capsule to the outpost for use as an emergency-escape vehicle. Such exchanges are done every six months, and it only takes two cosmonauts to take a new capsule up and return the aging one to Earth.
Why waste the empty seat, the Russians figured, when they could sell a ticket for big bucks. Tito would presumably be the first of a series of high-paying passengers.
Room for compromise: NASA and the other partners haven't ruled out passengers in the future, maybe even as early as October. But not now.
Tito, an engineer by education, has been training at Russia's cosmonaut training center outside Moscow since last August. He began training for a flight to the Russian space station Mir, which, of course, the Russians were free to do.
Mir had an impressive role in space history before the Russians decided they could not longer afford its and allowed it to crash into the sea last Friday. But it also had its troubles. An on-board fire and a collision with a module during a docking maneuver had near-tragic results. The Russians rolled the dice more than once with the aging Mir, and were lucky to avoid disaster.
At times the U.S. space effort has also taken unwarranted chances, but NASA seems to have learned a lesson and now goes about space exploration with a solid commitment to safety.
Space travel, as we all know, will never be guaranteed safe. But NASA and its other partners must remain firm in their position that no one nation can decide to pursue action that the others consider unjustifiably hazardous to the station or its occupants.