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Lance Bass was riding high around the turn of the millennium thanks to the success of NSYNC, the boy band that had helped propel him to international superstardom.
So what are you supposed to do next when you’re on top of the world? Well, the most obvious answer is to take a trip that’s literally out of this world.
Bass was hoping to do exactly that when he agreed to be at the center of the proposed documentary that was supposed to follow him undergoing astronaut training in Russia’s Star City before capping off the experience by hopping aboard the Soyuz space vessel that was set to ferry him and a couple of other passengers to the International Space Station.
That saga unfolded long before Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos engaged in the pettiest Space Race imaginable, and Bass would’ve been one of the first civilians to get the opportunity to take a trip into The Final Frontier.
Unfortunately, things fell apart midway through 2002 after the sponsors who’d agreed to back the project pulled their financial support ahead of the launch that was scheduled for October 30th of that year.
It’s safe to say that did not sit well with some people in Russia who were relying on certain payments to go through, as Bass recalled the fallout of those setbacks while discussing his time training in the country during a recent conversation with Ars Technica:
“There were a lot of problems with Russia and Hollywood in trying to make this happen.
There were even a couple of weekends that I would get kicked off the base in Russia. They would put a gun to my head and be like, ‘Where’s the money? Where’s the money?’
“It was crushing. Especially spending that many hours doing something you’re so passionate about. And I didn’t really know what was happening because when I was training at Star City, I didn’t know what was happening in the outside world.
There was a single phone line that no one ever called me on. There was no Internet. So it was just very disappointing.”
That certainly sounds less than ideal.