I’d promise you the moon and the stars, but then I’d be lying. What I can promise you is a trip into space. For real. Spacewalks are now available as luxury travel for painfully wealthy jetsetters.

You know all about travel agencies but ever heard of a space travel agency? There is one out there: Space Adventures. It is offering the luxury destination of a lifetime – spacewalks 350 km (220 miles) above Earth.

Jumpin’ Jupiter. We’re not talking Air Jordan kind of spacewalks here. Free online basketball tips are all good but this, my friends, is the real deal. Truth is, the space travel package totally lets you play astronaut, or cosmonaut.

You get 190 hours of training at the Star City cosmonaut school near Moscow. 16 days’ stay aboard the International Space Station. Round-trip rocket flights from Kazakhstan. And the finale – a chance to float outside the orbital outpost for 90 minutes, which is how long it takes to orbit Earth once.

Sheesh. Excuse me while I drool. So what does walking in space cost these days? Well, money talks in spacewalks. Each trip costs £19 million pounds. Now that’s gotta hurt.

Seriously, the amount isn’t so out of this world. You will be wearing a spacesuit worth £6.5 million pounds each, with its own life-support system and designed to protect from extreme temperatures. Safety tethers will anchor you to the space station hurtling about the planet at five miles per second. A cosmonaut will be with you the whole time.

Arthur C. Clarke was right on the money with 2001: A Space Odyssey – that was the year the first space tourist, American tycoon Dennis Tito, vacationed into orbit. Two more have since spacewalked while a fourth one, Japanese Internet gazillionaire Daisuke ‘Dice-K’ Enomoto, awaits his turn in September this year.

Those four each paid a fee of £11 million pounds for their luxury travel in space. Unluckily for the rest, the fee goes up an extra £8 million pounds after Dice-K, who intends to spacewalk dressed as Char Aznable from Mobile Suit Gundam. Hey, whatever floats you.

“The only thing between [spacewalkers] and space will be the visor on their space helmet. It’s the most magnificent view mankind can have,” says Space Adventures VP Stacy Tearne. Moonwalker Buzz Aldrin, of Apollo 11 fame, is an adviser for the space travel agency, whose spacewalk packages are brokered through Roscosmos, the Russian space agency.

NASA, an international partner, isn’t sold on space tourism. Fewer than 200 astronauts and cosmonauts have thus far walked in space, a luxury travel now afforded affluent tourists. For us whose financial assets aren’t so spatial, it’s back to Air Jordan and free online basketball tips and dreaming on. Indeed, why walk when you can fly?

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