American businessman Dennis Tito on April 28, 2001, became the first space tourist by paying $20 million to fly with the Russian to the International Space Station (ISS). He was docked at the ISS for 8 days and 20 years later, he still considers that the best experience of his life.

In an interview with the BBC, Tito, recalling his experience, said: “I was excited, you know, from beginning to end.”

Before boarding a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, Tito trained for eight months.

“The hardest part was the training. The spaceflight was easy. And it was fun. I found myself sitting on top of the rocket. We had a few hours of wait. I was pretty tired because we had to get up early. I think I ended up just falling asleep for a few seconds,” he said.

According to a BBC report, he was in space nine minutes later and made history as the first flight tourist.

He further spoke about the feeling of weightlessness.

“You had pencils that were on strings, you know, in the capsule, and as soon as you reached orbit, you went weightless on the burnout of the third engine and the pencil started floating in the air. You knew you were there,” he said.

A couple of days after take-off, he successfully docked at the ISS on April 30.

“It turns out that you go around the Earth once in every 90 minutes. 45 minutes, you can look out and see the Earth. And I would spend most of that time looking out at the Earth, taking pictures. Can you imagine having eight days being weightless and being euphoric,” he said about his experience.

On July 11, Virgin Galactic’s Richard Branson flew to the edge of space and came back successfully. And on July 20, tech-billionaire Jeff Bezos will be taking off from Mexico and fly to space. He is reportedly going to spend around 10-11 minutes in the space and then land back. Both of them used their own aerospace companies.