CAVIAR AND OTHER SPACE ADVENTURES

Commercial space travel is closer than ever and astro-tourist Ruaridh Nicoll takes a zero-gravity ride with French company Orbite in preparation for Champagne-fuelled trips to the final frontier

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Jean-Francois Clervoy, a French J astronaut who has spent almost a month in space, holds up a globe of water and lets it. spin away. It resembles a small Earth as it rotates past my nose. I reach for it, unbalancing myself, and as my head tilts towards the floor I see the globe shatter against the boot of a passing tech entrepreneur. I am a trainee space tourist, on a parabolic Zero-G flight in a converted Airbus A310 over the sea near Arcachon, on France's Atlantic coast. The wobbly water is an ephemeral yet tangible representation of something that for decades has seemed mostly abstract; represented by renderings and unfulfilled promises. But space travel has arrived, almost as if by stealth, and I'm here on a four-day astronaut training course run by French company Orbite. The reverie is interrupted by a call of "feet down". I collapse to the padded floor of the jetliner and around me-surreallyfalls a scattering of French high society, including a Pernod Ricard executive and the glamorous entrepreneur wife of a skincare billionaire. Here, though, we are like children as the plane, piloted by fighter and test pilot Eric Delesalle, begins to climb once more. He'll later tell me this is "a real job"; that one tiny mistake would see everyone crashing into the front toilet of the plane. And it is true: attendants wait to catch those who push away too fast, hurtling through the cabin. At first my fellow passengers are cagey, then intrepid and at last, in some cases, clearly queasy. There is a call of "10", then "40", describing the aircraft's angle, then finally "injection". The big plane enters freefall. I am standing and my feet slowly separate from the floor, as do those of my fellow trainees. I do a slow, nervous somersault, like the ones true astronauts make as they enter the International Space Statio