Lance Bass Space Trip Officially Off

NEW YORK (NSync Fans Website) - *NSYNC singer Lance Bass will be keeping his feet on the ground for the time being as NASA was officially notified by the Russian Space Agency on Monday (September 9) that the 23-year-old will not be permitted to take part in a Soyuz rocket launch on October 28. Last week, the Russian group told Bass to call off his planned trip to the International Space Station (ISS) after the singer failed to come up with the $20 million to pay for the flight.

NASA received a fax from Russia's director of human space flight on Monday stating that Bass would not be allowed to take part in the flight. "We received the letter from Mr. M.V. Sinelshchikov, the director of human space fight programs at the Russian Aviation and Space Agency," NASA spokeswoman Debra Rahn told. "It was faxed to Mr. Frederick Gregory in his capacity as the chairman of the ISS Multilateral Coordination Board."

Gregory is responsible for overseeing the management of the ISS, and he was recently named NASA's deputy administrator. NASA forwarded copies of the fax to the other agencies involved in the ISS program - the Canadian Space Agency, the European Space Agency, and the National Space Development Agency of Japan.

The 23-year-old Bass would have been the youngest person ever and the first pop star to fly into space. Bass would have followed in the footsteps of prior space tourists Dennis Tito and Mark Shuttleworth. Bass recently told reporters in Houston that if this trip didn't work out he would try to qualify for another mission at a later date.