Nasa to open International Space Station to tourists from 2020

Space tourist trips are expected to cost £39m (Dh182.7m) per person

In this image made from video provided by NASA, Expedition 59 Commander Oleg Kononenko, center, participates in a spacewalk outside the International Space Station with Flight Engineer Alexey Ovchinin, obscured, on Wednesday, May 29, 2019. (NASA via AP)
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Nasa has announced it will open up the International Space Station for tourism from next year.

It is expected to run two trips for tourists a year for stays of up to 30 days.

The cost of each trip is expected to be £39m (Dh182.7m) per person, with Nasa getting £27,000 (Dh126,501) for each night a person stays on the station.

"Nasa is opening the International Space Station to commercial opportunities and marketing these opportunities as we've never done before," Nasa chief financial officer Jeff DeWit said in New York.

"There will be up to two short private astronaut missions per year," said Robyn Gatens, deputy director of the ISS.

"These missions will be privately funded, dedicated commercial spaceflights."

The ISS is 250 miles above Earth and orbits around the planet.

Astronauts have lived on the ISS since 2000.

The first component of the ISS was launched into orbit in 1998, and the station has been continually occupied since November 2011.

The space agency recently announced that it planned to return to the moon by 2024, taking the first woman there and the first person in decades.