Their mission: To deliver a fresh Soyuz spacecraft that will provide full-time station crews with a lifeboat should a crisis require an emergency return to Earth. The Soyuz will replace an identical craft that will have depleted most of its fuel reserves by late April.
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The signing of the agreement, meanwhile, came just days after NASA officials said mid-February meetings were being set up with their Russian counterparts to open up formal discussions about the possibility of flying civilians to ISS on Soyuz taxi flights.
Tito, however, told SPACE.com the agreement is not contingent upon NASAs approval.
"The only contingency in that agreement is the formal approval of the [Russian] State Interdepartmental Commission for myself to be on the crew, and that pretty much is a formality that in part involves making the final medical check," he said.
Made up of officials from various Russian civilian and military space organizations, the commission reviews flight readiness and grants final launch approval for cosmonaut crews.
"I already passed the medical checks for Mir flights, and I have no doubt about qualifying for the ISS flight."
A minor bout with the early stages of pneumonia is not expected to be a showstopper.
"I have spent so much time in the last 40 years envisioning what it would be like to look back at Earth from space, and to experience what I think is the ultimate frontier," he said.
"Frankly, I just cant find the words to describe my euphoria just thinking about it. And just being there I dont know it just sounds better to me than sitting in the Oval Office."
The wealthy financier who was admitted to the Central Scientific-Research Air Force Hospital in Moscow earlier this week is expected to be discharged Thursday or Friday and then will head to the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center at Star City for mission training.
Also on tap: A Feb. 26 through March 2 training trip that will take Tito, Musabayev and Baturin to NASAs Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.
"Im going to be doing nothing else for the next three months. Its just going to be a full eight-hours-a-day of training both theory and classroom training as well as [flight] simulator training," Tito said. "All my training so far has been on the Soyuz and the Mir. But as it turns out, that really will be a bonus because 90 percent of the systems that I learned on the Mir core module are the same as the ISS core module."
Tito who founded Wilshire Associates, an investment management company based in Los Angeles -- originally was slated to fly to Russias Mir space station with Musabayev and Baturin.
In an unprecedented deal, the 60-year-old paid an estimated $12 million to $20 million to MirCorp, a commercial company owned primarily by RSC Energia, the firm that operates Mir and also serves as the prime Russian contractor for the new international station.
Those plans, however, were dashed when the Russians decided to send the aging Mir on a destructive dive back through the atmosphere and into the Pacific Ocean on March 6.
But RSC Energia officials earlier this month opened up discussions that led to the signing of the new agreement with Rosaviacosmos Director General Yuri Koptev.
With the Soyuz launch now scheduled for April 30, Tito and the two cosmonauts are scheduled to arrive at the international station on May 2. The trio then would spend the next six days readying the Soyuz now parked at the station for a return to Earth.
"You know that Soyuz has been sitting up there for six months, so Im sure were going to have to wake it up and make sure everything works," Tito said, adding that hes fully aware of -- and willing to -- accept the inherent risk involved with the flight.
"I would say that I recognize that there are certain risks, but the probabilities are pretty high in my view as far as having a successfully mission, and Im not worried about anything going wrong," the former NASA engineer said.
"There is always a chance that something will go wrong, but at age 60, theres always a chance somethings going to go wrong if you just sit in your rocking chair."
Russian plans to fly Tito, meanwhile, have put NASA in a bit of a quandary.
The U.S. space agency is a bit reluctant when it comes to the idea of flying civilian space tourists to the new station. But at the same time NASA officials realize that the agency can hardly tell Rosaviacosmos who it can and cannot fly to the outpost, the central hub of which now is its Russian-financed command post and crew quarters.
"The Russian's have the key to their spaceshipso from a physical point of view I don't have any way of keeping the Russians from launching a rocket with somebody else in it," NASA space station project manager Tommy Holloway said earlier this month. "On the other hand, we do have a great deal of interaction and program management interface with the Russians and I expect that we would be able to influence decisions they make along the way."
Tito has a different point of view on the agencys dilemma.
"The question I would ask is this: If Dennis Tito was on the crew of the next shuttle flight [to the station], would Dennis Tito have to be approved by the Russians?" he asked.
A lifelong space fanatic who once played a key role in designing flight trajectories for NASA planetary exploration missions, Tito looks at the upcoming Soyuz flight as an opportunity for the U.S. space agency to spark interest among the American public.
"You know, there is a real opportunity here," Tito said.
"Whether NASA likes it or not, there is going to be a lot of publicity about the station. And I think there is really a potential if NASA embraces this to really benefit from the idea of private individuals traveling in space," he said.
"I actually think it can generate a lot of interest from the public. And I think it would really enhance the publics awareness and identification with the International Space Station and ultimately have a positive effect on funding for NASA."
Whats more, Tito says his flight and others that will follow could lead to the opening of the space frontier to average citizen, much like early 20th-century forays in aviation ultimately paved the way to the commercial airline industry.
"You know, a little less than 100 years ago it was only the few and very rich people that could have access to [airplane flights]," Tito said.
"Now if we get private individuals traveling in space, then the public will start to identify, and it will open up opportunities in the future," he said. "And if youre a young kid, or even in your 20s, you might say 'Geez, this is going to be possible, and its real exciting.'"
The potential result: A burgeoning new space tourism market for spaceflights that could become both routine and relatively affordable.
"If there is a market demand that is created for space travel for private citizens," said Tito, "eventually there will be access to space."
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