MOSCOW NASA's representative in Moscow said on Friday it had not yet approved a trip by Maverick U.S. businessman Dennis Tito to the International Space Station, making him the world's first "space tourist." Russian space officials said earlier this week that they had signed a contract with Tito Monday to take him on April 30 on a pioneering 10-day "taxi flight" to the ISS on-board a Soyuz spacecraft. "It's a joint international enterprise so there are multilateral crew operation panels and bilateral crew operation panels where every person that goes to the iss has to be approved (by both sides)," said NASA's representative in Moscow, Carlos Fontanot. 20"As far as Mr. Tito's flight to the ISS, there has not been an official request to NASA, so that will be discussed next week. The flight may very well take place but there is nothing official yet," he told AFP. Officials from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Russian Space Agency will meet next week at the Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas, to discuss Tito's trip, Fontanot said. A Russian space agency spokesman, Sergei Gorbunov, said Friday that the U.S. businessman, now in a hospital in Moscow suffering from a slight bout of pneumonia, was likely to begin a 10-day training program early next week. He will spend his time at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center at star city near Moscow. Under the agreement, Tito will fly to the new international station with Russian cosmonauts Talgat Musabayev and Yury Baturin. The NASA spokesman said next week's talks would also hold discussions about the possibility of flying other "space tourists" to the ISS on Soyuz crafts. "Taxi flights don't occur that often (every six months). Still I'm sure that will be addressed and certain flights will be identified," said Fontanot. Taxi flights bring a fresh Soyuz spacecraft to provide resident crew members with an emergency exit should a crisis require an emergency return to earth. Tito, a 60-year-old former NASA aerospace engineer, signed a contract last June to make a space flight to the ageing Mir space station in early 2001, agreeing to put up 20 million dollars of his own money for the privilege. But the cash-strapped Russian government has decided to destroy the nearly 15-year-old orbiter in early March, dropping it into the Pacific Ocean. The first manned mission to the ISS, which is sponsored by 16 nations, was mounted by U.S. astronaut William Shepherd and Russian cosmonauts Sergei Krikalyov and Yury Gidzenko, who have been on board the space station since November 2.