Wildwings, a travel agency in Bristol, is already taking bookings for tourist trips into space that could begin as early as 2004. According to John Brodie-Good, the company's managing director, the £70,000 sub-orbital flight, lasting anything from 40 to 90 minutes and with two to three minutes of weightlessness guaranteed at the highest point, is only the beginning of what will soon be on offer to the space tripper. "By 2015 it will be possible to spend the weekend orbiting the earth," Brodie-Good predicts, "and there are already designs for space hotels, with rooms set to varying levels of gravity to stop the guests getting space sickness." For wannabe members of the 200-mile-high club, Mir, the Russian space station, is being financed and kept aloft by a Netherlands-based company, MirCorp, which has plans to use it for commercial purposes, including space tourism. Last week, the station was refu It's tourism, but not as we know it.

As Mr Kubrick's 2001 inches nearer, space fiction is becoming fact. Wildwings, a travel agency in Bristol, is already taking bookings for tourist trips into space that could begin as early as 2004. According to John Brodie-Good, the company's managing director, the £70,000 sub-orbital flight, lasting anything from 40 to 90 minutes and with two to three minutes of weightlessness guaranteed at the highest point, is only the beginning of what will soon be on offer to the space tripper. "By 2015 it will be possible to spend the weekend orbiting the earth," Brodie-Good predicts, "and there are already designs for space hotels, with rooms set to varying levels of gravity to stop the guests getting space sickness." For wannabe members of the 200-mile-high club, Mir, the Russian space station, is being financed and kept aloft by a Netherlands-based company, MirCorp, which has plans to use it for commercial purposes, including space tourism.

Last week, the station was refuelled and repositioned at a higher orbit, ready for its first commercial and scientific guests. Instead of the normal view from your bedroom window, "imagine waking", the Mir website coos, "to the green of entire continents, the blue of entire oceans with the deep expense of space beyond". Currently in training for the first tourist flight up to the station is Citizen Explorer Dennis Tito, a former US space programme engineer, who is rumoured to be paying $20m for the privilege. Wildwings already provides (mostly corporate) clients the opportunity to fly "to the edge of space" in a MiG supersonic fighter (above right). The high point of that £3,859 experience, apparently, is the weightless moments when the cabin crew send passengers flying the length of the plane in Superman style. At 80,000ft the sky is black, the stars bright and the Earth clearly curved. Of course, for a fiver you can have the view, at least, in an Imax cinema - and you won't have to fight for a window seat. Do caravanners even dream in beige?Closer to Earth, Melinda Messenger did her best to bring a bit a glamour to the Caravan and Outdoor Leisure Show at Earl's Court last week.