Circus founder prepares for space

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — A former stiltwalker and fire-eater stole NASA’s show Thursday, saying he’ll be “like a kid in a candy store” experimenting with zero- gravity tricks on his upcoming tourist trip to the international space station.

Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberte is shelling out a reported $35 million for his round-trip ticket aboard a Russian spacecraft. He will rocket into orbit from Kazakhstan at the end of September with a professional astronaut and cosmonaut and spend more than a week at the space station.

At a news conference in Houston, as 13 people circled overhead on the shuttle-station complex, Laliberte was bombarded with questions from journalists, most of them gathered in his home country of Canada.

“As you know, I’m not a scientist. I’m not a doctor. I’m not an engineer. I’m an artist. I’m a creator, and I’ll try to do and accomplish this mission with my creativity and what life has given me as a tool,” said the Quebec billionaire, who turns 50 in September.

Laliberte assured reporters that he will not play with any fire in space — for obvious reasons. But he hopes to try some acrobatics in weightlessness and may teach his crewmates a card trick or two.

“I don’t know how we’ll be using stilts up there,” he said. “But I think there are a couple little things, hopefully, that I have learned in my career of street entertainer that I will try to apply up there.”

Laliberte said he’s seen pictures of floating bottles and other items at the space station that might make for some interesting tricks. But he noted, “I think I will be more like a kid in a candy store up there, discovering things that those guys know. Because I know what I can do on Earth. But what I’m really interested is to gain and learning what their world is.”

As Laliberte talked up creativity, art and safe water for the world’s poor in both English and French, astronauts 220 miles up placed science experiments on the new front porch of Japan’s $1 billion space station lab.

Thursday’s work involved using the 33-foot robot arm on the lab, Kibo — Japanese for “hope” — to install three experiments.