NSYNC's Lance Bass hasn't given up his dream of space travel: 'There are plans for me to go'
In a bid to join a 2002 Russian mission to the International Space Station (ISS), the former NSYNC boy band member was certified by both NASA and the Russian Space Program after several months of cosmonaut training. But it ultimately fell through when he was unable to raise the funds for the trip. At the age of 23 at the time, he would've been the youngest person to travel into space.
Since then, Bass continued his advocacy for space programs and has kept in touch with both government space agencies and private companies looking to make space tourism a reality.
"There's no specific date, but there are plans for me to go," Bass told Business Insider recently. "But yeah, things keep getting delayed and delayed, but eventually in the next five to 10 years I would say that once we're really flying to space a lot more that I'll be able to take that mission."
"All my experiments that I was going to do with Russia got there before I did," he said. "I was doing environmental studies and I was doing some blood work studies up on the ISS. I won't be able to continue those studies when I do go. But hopefully when I do go in the future, I'll have something else fun to do up there."
Aside from music, Bass has moved into new adventures in television and movies as a producer on projects like feature film "On the Line"; documentary film "Kidnapped for Christ"; and hosting Logo TV's gay dating show, "Finding Prince Charming," and starring on Fox's upcoming celebrity cooking competition, "My Kitchen Rules."
Yet despite all of his accomplishments, space travel has been his oldest passion.
"When I was a kid, my first launch my grandfather took me to when I was probably eight years old and I was just addicted since then," he said. "I went to space camp. I loved everything about it. I wanted to go to school for space engineering, so I could become an astronaut. And then, my life detoured into music for a little bit."