Listening to Terry Fallis' 2012 novel "Up and Down," his third I believe. I'm trying to listen my way through all of those available as podcast feeds.
The idea is that a PR firm is given the task of reinvigorating public support for NASA and and Canada's CSA. The new guy (David) throws out a brainstorm for a contest so a regular citizen of each of the countries gets a "working" trip to the ISS. (They would be doing some of the work up there, not just staring out the window.). The selection of the vetted candidates would be made by a random drawing.
It may be a 2012 thing. But an' t'were me, I'd do more of a "America's Got Talent" thing, with perhaps periodic interviews or minidocumentaries about each of the top X contestants, and the audience voting for their favorite candidates. A drawing is like the lottery, people are interested till they find out their number wasn't drawn, then they're off to something else.
Have them do the voting and they have some ownership of *their* candidate. And if their candidate doesn't win, they were still part of the process, and they're still invested in the success of The Whole Thing.
Then again, Terry has decades of experience in PR, so I suppose he'd know better than I. And it's likely a moot point; closest we came to Citizen Astronaut was Teacher in Space -- which didn't turn out well, no fault of the Teacher in Space idea. Maybe someday.
"I blame you for the moonlit sky...."
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