My mission is to rekindle the public's passion for space exploration and to make money doing it

James Cameron

On Wednesday, Nasa administrator Daniel Goldin, speaking to a US House of Representatives subcommittee, praised Cameron for deciding to delay his trip until the ISS was ready for tourists.

Goldin quoted Cameron as saying: "I am going to wait until the partners work things out and then go at an appropriate time and I'll even train."

In a presentation to potential backers, Cameron said: "Astronauts are remarkable people and good at their jobs. But unfortunately their job description does not include the poetry and passion necessary to convey to the Earthbound what it means to live and work in space.

"My mission is to rekindle the public's passion for space exploration and to make money doing it."

New cameras

He plans to make several films, including a two-hour feature-length movie, an I-Max 3-D film and a four-hour TV special.

He thinks that no camera yet sent into space has really captured what it is like to be there, so he is collaborating with some of the world's top film engineers at Sony's research facility in Tokyo to design a state-of-the-art camera.

He said: "It is our goal to do nothing less than revolutionise the way the citizen of planet Earth thinks about the human exploration of space."

He has also been working on the construction of a remote-operated vehicle that will fly around inside the ISS carrying a camera.

Cameron has a reputation for putting himself in the right place to get the best shots.

When making the film Titanic he dived to the wreck in a Russian submarine and shot some film that features at the start of the movie.