Your Spaceflight Manual is a non-fiction book by David Ashford and Patrick Collins describing the possibilities of a future space tourism industry. It was first published in 1990. The book contains analysis of the costs and benefits, the potential market, and the safety factors of space tourism, and gives rough designs for the types of space vehicles and stations that would become necessary to support a full-fledged space tourism industry. This culminates with a description of a large space hotel (parts of which are spun to generate rotational artificial gravity), and the activities that space tourists might engage in, including zero-gravity sports and Earth-gazing.
Predictions[]
The book gave a rough timeline of predictions for the future of space tourism, based on analogy with the history of commercial aviation. It predicted that the first space tourist would fly around the year 2000. This proved accurate when the multimillionaire Dennis Tito paid for a seat on a Soyuz spacecraft in 2001. However, the book also predicted that by 2005 the price of a trip into space would have dropped to below 100,000 USD. In 2005 the third space tourist, Gregory Olsen, paid an estimated 20 million USD for his trip to the International Space Station.