Flying into space may not be everybody's idea of the ideal holiday, but punters with more money than sense will soon have the chance to view the wonders of the earth from on high.
From as little as £72,000 ($90,000) anybody will be able to fly 100 km up into the mesosphere (the area above the stratosphere) for a trip lasting between 40 and 90 minutes.
The aircraft will enter the edge of space but will not actually go into orbit. Completion of such a ride would still officially class you as an astronaut, however. NASA considers anybody who has flown at that altitude an astronaut.
The trips are available from Wildwings, a UK agent for the American company Space Adventures.
The US firm promises sub-orbital space flights out of Star City, Russia, "the heart of the Russian Space programme and home to the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre", Wildwings trumpets on its website.
Mr Ian Collier, sales development manager at Wildwings, says the private space industry is relatively new but is rapidly gathering pace. He says the first sub-orbital space flights should be possible between 2003 and 2005, but that if more capital became available, the process could quicken.
Space travel is the next step in extreme holiday packages, Mr Collier says. The demand for extreme travel products was obviously there, given the fact that trips to the Antarctic now attract thousands of people every year. He says people who have taken these trips are now looking for a new challenge, and space, the final frontier, is probably the ultimate adventure holiday.
The company started taking bookings for sub-orbital flights a year ago and several hundred people around the world have so far signed up.
Wildwings already offers an opportunity to experience the zero-gravity encountered while in orbit via a converted Aleutian 135, formerly used for training Russian cosmonauts.
The zero-G journey lasts two hours, with the craft making a series of steep climbs and descents which allow passengers to be "weightless" for a series of 30-second periods, around 5 minutes in all, during the flight. The trip costs £3,900, excluding flights to and from Russia.
Mr Collier says the space centre at Star City is the only place in the world where a private company or individual can charter such a craft. The trips are done in co-operation with the Russian military, which supplies the pilots for the flights.
For those with a lot more money to spare, Space Adventures are offering the opportunity for one person to orbit the Earth aboard the space station Mir for up to three weeks in this spring.
The all-inclusive package costs a mere £11,250,000 ($15,000,000) and the lucky punter will have to spend at least three months training and preparing at the Star City facility with other cosmonauts.
The flight to the 14-year-old space station will be aboard a Soyuz-TM spacecraft, which takes only six minutes to travel from Earth to orbit. However, strict medical criteria will apply to the participant, so John Glenn impersonators, unless extremely fit, need not apply.
The X-prize Foundation of St Louis, Missouri, with a number of space associations, is offering a $10 million prize ($5 million of which has already been raised) for the best design for a craft to facilitate civilian space travel. Sixteen teams have entered so far.
The winner will have to produce a craft that can fly at least 100 km above the Earth, high enough to be judged an astronaut, but not so high that re-entry necessitates an exotic heat shield.
The vehicle must be able to carry three people and be able to fly twice within two weeks so that the cost of re-flight would only include fuel and limited labour, which would keep the cost per seat down.
Hilton is planning to get in on the space act with the construction of a space station hotel made up of used booster rockets from NASA.
Hilton is also planning a hotel on the moon, featuring pressurised bedrooms, a beach and swimming area, and a working farm.