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Astronauts trained at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, to prepare to fly aboard the Boeing Starliner spacecraft, which could one day take tourists into space.
The Reuters news agency had access to the space center to see the astronauts undergo training for the planned flight.
The experiment included wearing a space suit and exploring a submarine model of the space station.
It is a neutral buoyancy laboratory, designed to simulate the feeling of weightlessness in the space.
Boeing competes with Elk Musk's SpaceX to become the first private company to provide manned spaceflight from the United States, following the completion of the space shuttle program in 2011.
NASA pays the two companies nearly $ 7 billion (5.7 billion pounds sterling) for the construction of rocket and capsule launch systems, which will carry NASA astronauts.
Space flights are only for professionals at the moment, but future missions may be open to tourists.
"Up to now, only about 500 people have gone into outer space.This is so little compared to the seven or eight billion people on planet Earth," said L & # 39; Astronaut Mike Fincke.
"Hopefully in the next 10 years it will go from 500 to 5,000. And [in] the next 20 years, maybe even 50,000 or more. It will be great to have more people to see what I've seen. "
His fellow astronaut Suni Williams said: "I wish everyone on the planet could take a tour around the planet once, just to see it from this point of view … [to] see our planet and recognize that we only have one house, we should probably take care of it and we should probably be a little nicer to each other. "
Photos of Mike Blake.
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