This is a 5000 square feet exhibit that opened at Discovery Place, Charlotte, North Carolina USA on 16 June 2001. It will stay there for six months, and then travel internationally for six years, spreading the ISS story to more than 5.5 million people. Their own website is at the International Space Station Exhibit.

Here is a photo of 'my' section

As a matter of fact, this is far from my first involvement in space tourism. After Galactic Tours: Thomas Cook Out of This World Holidays (Vacations in USA), with Bob Shaw, was published in 1981, Tnomas Cook appointed me their Consultant on Space Tourism. They already had a list containing thousands of names of people who want to go on the first commercial flights into space ~ but closed this office a couple of years ago, because it was 'using too many of their resources'. A short-sighted decision, in my opinion, since space is the next destination for tourists, and it's going to be big in 10 or 15 years' time. Wait and see! (Dennis Tito has of course become the first space tourist, but don't worry, the price will come down...).

You can find several links to Space Tourism sites on my Links page, where you can learn much more. Meanwhile, here are some of the images used in the ISS exhibit:

A SuperShuttle arrives at the Space Hotel, consisting of a rotating 'wheel', to provide artifical gravity, attached to several cylindrical modules, containing facilities such as the Zero-G Stadium and the Low-G Swimming Pool.

Tourists learn to cope with zero-gravity; inside (behind a plexiglass screen) and outside, in the vacuum of space but (of course) wearing spacesuits.

The inside of one module rotates slowly ~ just enough that water clings to its cylindrical walls. Swimmers can throw huge 'waterballs' at each other, or even dive through them.