James Lance Bass (; born May 4, 1979) is an American pop singer, dancer, actor, film and television producer, and author. He grew up in Mississippi and rose to fame as the bass singer for the American pop boy band NSYNC. NSYNC's success led Bass to work in film and television. He starred in the 2001 film On the Line, which his company, Bacon & Eggs, also produced.

In February 2002, Lena Banks, a space advocate and founder/producer of Think Tank Ink Productions, contacted Lance Bass to propose his involvement in her Youngest Person in Space project. Banks brought her longtime associate David Krieff of Destiny Productions on board and through a series of events in August 2002, Bass entered cosmonaut training in Star City, Russia. Bass was considered as the US host of a space competition show to be entitled The Big Mission, which had been successful in Denmark, in which several contestants would go through rigorous training in order to win a seat on a Russian Soyuz space capsule. However, the game show concept was reconsidered, as the producers of the show decided it would be a much better idea to shoot a documentary of a celebrity actually training and going into space, and airing it on a major network. Lena Banks came up with the idea of the Youngest Person in Space many years before Dennis Tito had his historical flight. Through a series of events in early 2002 the chance of using Bass was presented when a colleague mentioned her space project to a friend and the friend's daughter shouted out, "Lance Bass wants to go into space!" The girl, who was an NSYNC fan, learned of Bass' lifelong dream of space travel when she read it online via a MTV forum. Lena Banks spoke to Lance Bass's management who then went to him with the proposal. "At first he thought we were joking," Lena Banks remarks. "I assured him it was for real; he accepted and we moved forward with the project."  In order to be admitted into training, Bass had to go through strenuous physicals that saved his life. It was discovered he had cardiac arrhythmia, and he agreed to undergo heart surgery to correct it. Prior to this, in 1999, he collapsed after a concert because of his condition. After several months of training, Bass received cosmonaut certification and went on to Houston's Johnson Space Center (JSC) to take part in astronaut training. He was scheduled to fly into space on the Soyuz TMA-1 mission that was to be launched on October 30, 2002. The capsule was scheduled to fly to the International Space Station and land in a desert in Kazakhstan.  Several months before Bass was scheduled to fly, the original deal to air the documentary about Bass fell through. Bass's camp turned to MTV, who initially agreed to sponsor the trip but then backed out over "payment, insurance, and indemnification issues." Shortly after, all of Bass's other sponsorships fell through, including one sponsor that pulled out because they worried about the image of their brand possibly being tarnished if Bass were to die on the mission. Bass was eventually rejected from the program, and was replaced on the flight by Russian cosmonauts Yury Lonchakov, Sergei Zalyotin and Belgium's Frank De Winne.

why did the sponsors pull out?
one sponsor that pulled out because they worried about the image of their brand possibly being tarnished if Bass were to die on the mission.