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www.privateairny.com Private Air | Spring 2020 41 Mir, then all of a sudden you start seeing this fuzzy bright light and it gets a little bit brighter as you get close. en you start being able to make out the shape of the modules. It's kind of a fun experience to realise that Mir and Atlantis are going around the planet at a rate of about five miles a second and we're going to do this very precise series of manoeuvres to join up the two spacecraft and then spend some time with the only other people who are also off the planet. When I stepped onto Mir it was a little chaotic because we were all trying to get through the hatch at the same time. I had previously spent some time training with two cosmonauts who were on Mir so it was very special to see them again and give them a big hug, and then I just wanted to tour around. ere was a heck of a lot of equipment stowed on there so it was a lot more crowded than I thought it was going to be – Mir was much smaller than the modules they used for the International Space Station, so it was fairly cramped. One of the problems they had was that they didn't have a way to get large pieces of equipment back home to Earth to be repaired so they tended to keep all that stuff in case they needed to scavenge parts. We had seven members on our crew and there were three members on Mir. We were docked for about a week, and I was there primarily to get some NASA science experiments set up in the laboratory module. Time passed so quickly that it was suddenly time to come home again. But you do have some down-time – you try and take an hour-and-a half before bedtime just to look out the window and watch the world. It's a good way to relax, and I remember going over Europe and being amazed at all the airplane contrails – I had no idea that the air traffic had such a high density. Another time we had a night-time pass over Mount Etna and we could see the glow of the magma in the crater. People often ask me what I miss about space and it's hard to put it into words. You basically start off your flight with a rocket ride, which never disappoints, the engines cut off and you get to fl oat and fly around like Superman, and then you get to see the incredible beauty of this planet. When I want to get away from everything now I like to go hiking in the mountains. I live in Washington State and I'm not far from one of the volcanoes there, Mount Baker, and that's where I go, surrounded by the trees. It's a very pretty view – but it doesn't really compare to being in space. astronautwendylawrence.com WENDY B LAWRENCE Former NASA astronaut Wendy B Lawrence, 56, dreamed of going into space after seeing the Apollo Moon landings as a girl. Many years of hard work and a dash of good fortune later, she was floating in space and looking down on a view that would never get old WATCH THIS SPACE Be one of the first private astronauts WORLD VIEW Arizona's World View hopes to offer a two-hour space balloon flight from 2017, at $75,000 per person. In October 2015, it completed its highest ever test, sending a scale model 100,000ft into the Earth's atmosphere. VIRGIN GALACTIC The company unveiled its new SpaceShipTwo in February, after the first one crashed in tests. Future space tourists will sit in this vehicle as it is flown to 50,000ft by a mothership, then released to rocket its way to space. SPACEX When Google invests $1bn, something significant is going on. SpaceX received a huge cash injection last year, and shortly after announced that it will launch astronauts to the ISS by 2017. POSTCARD 536 people have travelled above the 100km mark that defines the beginning of space. Of these only seven were space tourists

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