At the height of his fame as a member of the internationally famous boy band NSYNC, Lance Bass came within about two weeks of going to space in 2002.

Bass had completed four months of rigorous training in Russia’s Star City during the spring and summer of that year, learning Russian and passing several challenging pre-launch tests. The plan was to fly up to the International Space Station on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft alongside two cosmonauts and spend about 10 days in orbit.

This was not a well-trodden path, especially for a 23-year-old musician who would have been by far the youngest person to fly into space. By mid-2002, only two wealthy businessmen, Dennis Tito and Mark Shuttleworth, had ever taken privately paid trips to space.