Welcome to the 21st century, folks. A place where every conceivable holiday destination on Earth has been ruthlessly covered by your friendly neighbourhood travel agent. Climbing inhospitable mountain ranges? Done. Safari trips through the deepest South American rainforests? Easy. Got the T-shirt saying 'My friend went on holiday to a hidden volcano in a hidden Tibetan valley and all he got me was this lousy t-shirt'? Of course you have.
Enter Dennis Tito, a 60-year-old Californian investment manager and former employee of NASA. Bored of Disneyland, Tito wanted to go somewhere a little different for his holidays - and US company Space Adventures was happy to oblige. After much training, negotiation and discussion with the Russian Space Federation and (unsurprisingly) a few million dollars, Tito got his wish: on April 28 2001 he became the world's first 'space tourist', spending 8 days on the International Space Station. The following year, South African Marc Shuttleworth followed suit. A new destination had arrived - space.
This is where The Space Tourist's Handbook comes in. From the first second you decide you want to go into space to the moment you splash down back in the ocean, the handbook is a comprehensive guide to the whole process. Want to know how to get through a psychological evaluation? How to dock with a space station? Even how to deal with a 'call of nature' in a zero-gravity environment? Here is where you'll find the answers.
Written by Eric Anderson (the president of Space Adventures) and Joshua Piven (co-author of the excellent Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook), the first thing that strikes you about The Space Tourist's Handbook is the book's design. A compact piece of kit, it just looks fantastic. Using a colour scheme of silver, green and purple, plenty of modern fonts and crammed full of illustrations and pictures, the book actually feels hi-tech. It may sound a small thing (the most important aspect is what's in the book, after all) but when you see the amount of thought that's gone into the appearance, you can't help but be impressed.
Article comments
1 - vikk
Well, travel writer though I be, I have to admit I hadn't thought of doing one on going into space--and I thought Texas was spacious enough for one book. I am clearly not thinking far enough out of the box on this one.