British singer Sarah Brightman will travel as a space tourist to the International Space Station.

 

The classical recording¹ artist, once married to Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber, will be part of a three-person crew flying to the space station.

 

After completing a tour in 2013, Ms Brightman will embark² on（从事，着手） six months of preparation at the Star City cosmonaut training centre in Moscow.

 

She will be the seventh space tourist to visit the station.

 

Once there, she says she intends to become the first professional musician to sing from space.

 

"This voyage is a product of a dream, my dream. Finally it can be a reality. I am more excited about this than anything I have done in my life to date," she said at a news conference in Moscow.

 

She added that the schedule for her flight would "be determined³ very shortly by (Russian federal space agency) Roscosmos and the ISS partners."

 

Alexey Krasnov, head of the ISS program at Roscosmos, said Ms Brightman had passed the required mental and physical examinations to fly into space.

 

Space Adventures, the Vienna-based company that organizes flights for private spacefarers, did not disclose how much Ms Brightman had paid for her seat on the Soyuz.

 

But the last space tourist, Cirque du Soleil chief executive Guy Laliberte, paid around $35m for the privilege（特权，优待）.

 

Sarah Brightman began her career with the dance troupe⁴ Hot Gossip, which had a chart hit in 1978 with I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper.

 

She subsequently starred on the West End stage in Cats and Phantom⁵ of the Opera, both penned by Andrew Lloyd Webber, whom she married in 1984.

 

The pair divorced in 1990 and Brightman embarked⁶ on a solo singing career. She helped popularize the classical crossover genre⁷, scoring a worldwide hit with her duet with Italian tenor⁸ Andrea Bocelli, Time To Say Goodbye.

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