The 12 months was 2002 and widespread boyband NSYNC was on its final tour for the album Celeb earlier than occurring an indefinite, heartbreaking hiatus. In the meantime, the band’s most forgettable member Lance Bass was set to embark on a way more memorable journey to house—a journey that by no means occurred.

This was earlier than billionaires and celebrities frequented house for funzies so it made fairly the impression on the time (that’s, should you exclude billionaire Dennis Tito, who went to house as a vacationer in 2001). Nonetheless, Bass by no means made it to the Worldwide House Station, and for causes that weren’t fully clear. It’s been one of many greatest lingering mysteries from the unusual period of the early 2000s: What went fallacious to forestall the singer from reaching his orbital targets?

In a current interview with Ars Technica, Bass lastly revealed the surprisingly terrifying particulars of why he by no means obtained to satisfy his dream of going to house.

Bass was set to trip on board a Russian Soyuz spacecraft with two cosmonauts on a journey to the ISS, the place he was going to spend round 10 days in orbit conducting analysis and different crew duties. The plan was for the journey to be sponsored by unnamed Hollywood filmmakers, who had been meant to cough up $20 million to pay for Bass’s trip to house, in keeping with the singer.

Whereas finishing 4 months of coaching at Russia’s Star Metropolis, the place the singer underwent pre-launch assessments and even discovered methods to converse Russian, Bass stated that he was threatened by Russian officers to provide them the cash. “There have been even a few weekends that I’d get kicked off the bottom in Russia,”
Bass stated within the interview. “They’d put a gun to my head and be like, ‘The place’s the cash? The place’s the cash?’”

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Well, Bass didn’t know where the money was, and the negotiations for funding ended in failure just days before the singer was scheduled to board the Soyuz spacecraft. “It was crushing,” Bass is quoted as saying. “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 [Russia’s Star City] I didn’t know what was occurring within the outdoors world. There was a single telephone line that nobody ever referred to as me on. There was no Web. So it was simply very disappointing.”

Bass is outwardly an enormous house nerd. The singer stated he wished to be a rocket engineer however as a substitute opted to be a singer in a boyband. At present, Bass is the narrator of an eight-part podcast sequence referred to as The Final Soviet, that delves into the story of Sergei Krikalev, the cosmonaut who was in house when the Soviet Union dissolved in December 1991.

Bass hopes to nonetheless sooner or later be capable to go to house, he stated.

Extra: Billionaires Despatched to House Weren’t Anticipating to Work So Exhausting on the ISS