A Star Trek fan who grew up in Iran is to become the first female space tourist, paying nearly $20 million for a trip on a Russian Soyuz rocket to the International Space Station, according to TrekToday.

Anousheh Ansari, who grew up watching Star Trek reruns in Iran before the Islamic cultural revolution, said that she never tired of telling her friends that she would "see the stars." Now 39-year-old Ansari will experience her dream "to get outside the planet and see the universe for what it really is."

Ansari had to pass medical tests and to train at Star City, the space center near Moscow that has prepared every cosmonaut since Yuri Gagarin in 1961. In addition to learning to survive G-force fluctuations, she was taught to fire a gun to protect herself in case of an emergency landing in Russia's steppes, TrekToday said.

"Ansari expressed an interest to fly aboard one of our craft late last year. She's very passionate about space," said Sergei Kostenko of U.S.-based Space Adventures, which has makes contracts with the Russian space agency to place tourists on flights.

To help more people to travel into space, Ansari is working with Space Adventures to develop a fleet of sub-orbital spaceships for commercial use and donated heavily toward the prize won by SpaceShipOne, which carried out the first manned space flight funded by private investors.

She made her fortune in the telecommunications business, according to TrekToday.