Given Richard Branson 's determination to get people into space it was only a matter of time before someone else decided to give them somewhere to stay.

Enter the Galactic Suite Space Resort, the world’s first space hotel. A Spanish initiative, the idea is that space tourists will travel to an unspecified tropical island for a short astronaut training course.

They will then repair to the island's spaceport which has a runway that, from the graphics on the website anyway, starts flat before bending sharply up towards the sky like a giant Scalextric set.

A short time after launching, passengers will pull into the driveway of their space hotel, for stays of between four to six days.

Days will become something of a fuzzy concept mind you, as, orbiting the earth at an average speed of 30,000kmh, you will circle it once every 90 minutes, meaning you will see 15 sunrises and sunsets daily.

If that’s not disorienting enough, you will be totally weightless too, making it the most effective spa resort imaginable, at least while you are there. The developers are also planning Star Gate, from which hotel guests can undertake their daily constitutional, out into nothing.

Unlike Branson’s enterprise, which is aimed at the super wealthy, this one’s stated aim is to make space travel available to the general public.

Then again, the aim was also to do it by 2012 and, unless there’s some sort of space/time continuum issue at play, it hasn’t happened yet.

galacticsuite.com