[imagesource: The Telegraph]

Prince William will have a field day with this.

There are apparently a fair few people wealthy enough and interested enough to take a trip to space.

But in order to help these billionaires decide if it is worth wasting millions on an actual flight, a French hotelier has set up a way to give them “mental, physical, and spiritual” preparation.

The idea is not to provide the usual military-style experience, but rather something a little bit more padded and fluffed up.

Think of an incredible five-star hotel experience with a galaxy worth of space-related activities nestled in among being served champagne, followed by plates of oysters.

Nicolas Guame is the French hotelier and mastermind behind Orbite, a $30 000 (around R440 000) three-day and four-night ‘astronaut orientation’.

Speaking to The Telegraph, Guame believes that there is no room for scepticism in space as “this is the year space tourism takes off,” said while promising that if you can afford it you can become a pioneer:

“People are buying missions and flying themselves,” he says, referring to the tech billionaire Jared Isaacman who by the time you read this should have become the first amateur astronaut to fly a full orbit (using SpaceX’s Dragon capsule).

There’s Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa who has booked a cruise round the moon on SpaceX’s bigger vessel, Starship. “And there’s Axiom [a Houston based company mostly made up of ex-NASA employees] that plans to build its own space station.”

Orbite has all the right people on board to make the luxury space camp everything an astronaut wannabe could dream of.

Brienna ‘Brie’ Rommes has been hired as Orbite’s director of astronaut training, who some years ago trained Branson and his son Sam at the NASTAR centre.

They also have Captain Eric Delesalle “flying parabolic arcs that recreate extraterrestrial conditions for his cargo of wannabe astronauts” as they soar over France’s Atlantic coast.

Jean-François Clervoy, who in the 1990s went up three times on NASA shuttles and has spent more than 28 days in space, might also make an appearance.

There are other famed people and professionals of space and luxury, but let’s talk about the hotel now, where the ‘astronaut trainees’ get to stay.

It is called La Co(o)rniche, the (o) being an “irritating Starck conceit” as the hotel was designed by Philippe Starck.

On the “edge of the otherworldly”, 105-metre high Dune of Pilat (the tallest sand dune in Europe), it has 29 rooms and cabins, all “pale, soft, and welcoming”:

As for the space activities on offer? Well, they’re plentiful and almost out of this world.

Reviewer Ruaridh Nicoll introduced the zero-gravity flight, where landing back on ‘Earth’ is just stepping onto the padded floor of a modified Airbus A310:

“Injection!” It’s the moment the plane enters freefall. I float up, nose to a swirling globe of blue water released by the real-life astronaut Jean-François Clervoy. The ball seems like a tiny Earth.

The various other ‘vehicles’ currently on offer at Orbite include virtual reality experiences that draw on everything known about Virgin Galactic’s SS2, Blue Origin’s New Shepard, and SpaceX’s Dragon and Starship.

After completing all the activities, the astronaut trainees get their very own graduation ceremony before tucking into “the biggest pile of shellfish”.

Must be nice.

[source:telegraph]