IT WILL be one small step for a tourist; one giant cheque for the travel agent.

A US company that pioneered out-of-this-world holidays to the International Space Station is offering ordinary citizens with extraordinary bank balances a new line in side-trips: spacewalks 350km (220 miles) above Earth.

For a mere £19 million, Space Adventures will broker 190 hours of training at the Star City cosmonaut school near Moscow, a stay of 16 days aboard the space station, round-trip rocket flights from Kazakhstan, and the chance to float outside the orbital outpost for 90 minutes — the time it takes to orbit the planet once.

“To see the sunrise and the sunset and all the Earth in between is really a precious experience,” Stacy Tearne, a Space Adventures vice-president, said.

“The only thing between them and space will be the visor on their space helmet. It’s the most magnificent view mankind can have.”

Spacewalks — known in the trade as extravehicular activities, or EVAs — are considered the Holy Grail of spaceflight. Fewer than 200 astronauts and cosmonauts have ventured out of their vehicles and into the void, usually to perform meticulously choreographed technical chores that allow them little time to marvel at the view.

Piers Sellers, 51, who recently returned from a space shuttle mission and holds the record for the most EVA hours logged by a British-born astronaut, likens the feeling to plunging from a skyscraper and falling endlessly, without ever hitting the ground.

“It’s a totally extraordinary sensation,” he said. “You look down and float out and there’s the world, this big, blue shiny planet . . . everything’s moving fast. The sun is racing across the sky. It’s the most beautiful thing.”

Spacewalkers must wear bulky pressure suits while strolling outside the airlock to keep them alive in the vacuum of space. Worth £6.5 million each, the spacesuits carry their own life-support systems and are designed to protect the wearer from extreme temperatures that can range from minus 82C (-116F) in shadow to 135C (275F) in sunlight. Safety tethers hold spacewalkers on to the space station, which hurtles around the planet at five miles a second. A cosmonaut will accompany tourists throughout their cosmic constitutional.

Space Adventures, whose advisers include the Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin, sent the first private space tourist — the American tycoon Dennis Tito — into orbit in 2001. Since then it has launched two others and has lined up a fourth — Daisuke Enomoto, a Japanese internet entrepreneur — to fly in September.

Their tickets cost £11 million each. Future guests after Mr Enomoto, who is also known as Dice-K, will have the option of participating in a spacewalk for an extra £8 million.

The package deals are brokered through Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, which uses the cash to help to pay its share of the costs of building and running the International Space Station.

But some of its international partners, notably Nasa, the US space agency, take a dim view of putting private thrill-seekers on the station. Their cynicism may be compounded by Mr Enomoto’s announcement that, while in space, he plans to dress as his favourite cartoon-strip anti-hero, Char Aznable, from the animated television series Mobile Suit Gundam.

Mr Enomoto, who has been in a tangle with Japanese authorities for alleged tax-dodging, has been preparing diligently for his role. He has bleached his hair and proudly displays an artist’s impression of himself dressed in Aznable’s futuristic pink spacesuit on his website.

Nasa will be hoping that once in orbit, Mr Enomoto’s enthusiasm for the fictitious space rebel does not get the better of him.

Char Aznable is the Japanese equivalent of Darth Vader, with shadowy ambitions to destroy Earth.

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