Vacation packages to space

There's a 95 percent chance Senior Editor Christine Sarkis is thinking about travel right now. Follow her on Instagram @postcartography and Twitter @ChristineSarkis.

Christine Sarkis is an SATW-award-winning journalist and executive editor at SmarterTravel. Her stories have also appeared on USA Today, Conde Nast Traveler, Huffington Post, and Business Insider. Her advice has been featured in dozens of print and online publications including The New York Times, Conde Nast Traveler, and People magazine. She has also shared travel tips on television and radio shows including Good Morning America, Marketplace, and Here & Now. Her work has been published in the anthologies Spain from a Backpack and The Best Women's Travel Writing 2008. She is currently working on a travel memoir.

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The latest frontier in tourism isn’t off-the-beaten path Eastern Europe or chilly Antarctica, it’s space. Galactic Suite has announced it will sell 18-week space packages that include space training on a Caribbean island, the flight into space, and three nights’ accommodations in an orbital hotel.

Packages for 2012 are expected to go on sale in 2008 for somewhere between €3 and €4 million (about $4.09 to $5.45 million U.S. dollars, see XE.com for the latest exchange rate). Hospitality.net has information on the space package, and Reuters has a more in-depth article on the space hotel.

The thing I like about space tourism packages is that it means that you don’t have to deal with finding a place to stay once you arrive. It’s an instance when planning ahead really pays off.

While in space, you don’t want to get lost, so it’s convenient that Google has just launched a space mapping service. Google Sky has similar navigation to Google Earth, but features constellations and planets.

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