Space Flight Europe-America 500

[citation needed] Bob Walsh, an entrepreneur and humanitarian who helped bring the Goodwill Games to Seattle, heard of the plan while visiting Moscow in 1991 and agreed to sponsor it in the U.S.

[2] On November 16, 1992, at 0:52 a.m. MSK, a Soyuz rocket fired an 8-foot-diameter (2.4 m), 5,152-pound spherical Resurs-500 capsule similar to the one flown by Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, from Russia's once-secret Plesetsk Cosmodrome.

The ship docked at 9 a.m. on November 24 at Pier 42 of the Port of Seattle, where it was met by government officials, including Mayor Norm Rice and Washington's Secretary of State Ralph Munro, school children, bands, and local residents as well as 330 Russian dignitaries, business leaders, scientists, journalists, and space officials, including Cosmonaut German Titov, the second Russian in space, who arrived in Seattle by charter flights.

[citation needed] Inside the capsule were 19 neon-orange containers with gifts, souvenirs, business products, artwork, religious icons, messages of peace also few hundred of bills of 1 rouble, the last one from the Soviet Union.

While all citizens of the Russian Federation, irrespective of specialty, occupation, or employment status, who were up to 40 years old, were eligible to apply to an open competition to be selected, unemployed people and women had been given priority.