Mark Shuttleworth, a South African Internet tycoon who paid tens of millions of dollars to go to the International Space Station aboard a Russian Soyuz craft, recounts his arrival in space--blinking, wondering, and weightless after the fire, shaking, and acceleration of liftoff--in Adam Fisher's oral history of space ­tourism ("'Very Stunning, Very Space, and Very Cool'"):

The thing I remember as being quite striking was this collection of very domestic sounds that kicks in after the main-engine cutoff. Mechanical sounds, like the air circulation and the conditioning, and then bits and pieces are kind of kicking in. You've got alarm clocks and fans, and you've got a big device called the "globus." It's a ball--your map, basically--that turns, and it starts going tick, tick, tick, like a cuckoo clock. You've just gone through this extraordinary experience of getting into space, and then suddenly it's like waking up inside the workshop of an old Swiss clockmaker or something. So it's this amazing contrast between what you might expect--which should involve special effects and background music--and the very mechanical physical reality of it.

Thus, even the most transcendental of real, human experiences (which Saul Bellow, in Mr. Sammler's Planet, evoked, wonderfully: "To blow this great blue, white, green planet or to be blown from it") occurs amid the most mundane technology.

That technology can be very old. The space tourist Charles Simonyi, a former Microsoft executive responsible for Word and Excel, whom we profiled two years ago ("Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Meta," January/February 2007), describes the optical sight on the Soyuz: "It's like a very old-fashioned--I don't know what it is. There is nothing, no items like that anymore. ... That instrument could have been constructed in the 19th century."