When Tom and Sandy visit the Apogee, the world's first space hotel, Tom begins to notice strange happenings and when the billionaire guest of the hotel goes missing, Tom suspects foul play.

What Tom's about to find is truly out of this world! It's the grand opening of APOGEE, the world's first space hotel, an orbital space station designed expressly for the tourist trade. As Swift Enterprises is a major investor in the project, and provided much of the necessary technology, Tom and Sandy have been invited to be among the first guests to visit! When they arrive at the APOGEE they experience weightlessness, learn about the high-tech nature of the hotel (including the robotic wait and cleaning staff), and play a game of zero-gravity badminton. But as Tom explores the ship he begins to notice some strange happenings. And when a billionaire guest of the hotel turns up missing,Tom suspects foul play....

The Hotel: Occupied Space explores the hotel as both symbol and space through the concept of “occupancy.” By examining the various ways in which the hotel is manifested in art, photography, and film, this book offers a timely critique of a crucial modern space. As a site of occupancy, the hotel has provided continued creative inspiration for artists from Monet and Hopper, to genre filmmakers like Hitchcock and Sofia Coppola. While the rich symbolic importance of the hotel means that the visual arts and cinema are especially fruitful, the hotel’s varied structural purposes, as well as its historical and political uses, also provide ample ground for new and timely discussion. In addition to inspiring painters, photographers, and filmmakers, the hotel has played an important role during wartime, and more recently as a site of accommodation for displaced people, whether they be detainees or refugees seeking sanctuary. Shedding light on the diverse ways that the hotel functions as a structure, Robert A. Davidson argues that the hotel is both a fundamental modern space and a constantly adaptable structure, dependent on the circumstances in which it appears and plays a part.

Sandeep Sanghavi, the mixed-race son of an Indian businesswoman and a famous American astronomer lives a nomadic albeit mundane life traveling the country with his mother's hotel consulting firm. His life becomes more interesting when various lost objects suddenly begin to reappear. Then a stranger calls and claims responsibility for the returned objects in exchange for an introduction to Sandeep’s astronomer father, the rebellious and eccentric Van Ray, who has no phone, email or qualms about having abandoned his son twenty years ago. Van Ray shows up broke with his pregnant ex-wife astronaut in tow, claiming to have discovered a big secret that will change their lives forever; a new discovery guaranteed to change him from “science famous” to “famous famous.” With his family together for the first time in years, Sandeep must juggle his father’s scientific search, his mother’s failing business and the tension of having family all together for the first time in decades.

Dreams, schemes and opportunity as space opens for tourism and commerce. Twentieth century space exploration may have belonged to state-funded giants such as NASA, but there is a parallel history which has set the template for the future. Even before Apollo 11 landed on the Moon, private companies were exploiting space via communication satellites - a sector that is seeing exponential growth in the internet age. In human spaceflight, too, commercialisation is making itself felt. Billionaire entrepreneurs Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson have long trumpeted plans to make space travel a possibility for ordinary people and those ideas are inching ever closer to reality. At the same time, other companies plan to mine the Moon for helium-3, or asteroids for precious metals. Science writer Andrew May takes an entertaining, in-depth look at the triumphs and heroic failures of our quixotic quest to commercialise the final frontier.

This collaborative book compiles 30 chapters on the theory and practice of designing and building inhabited environments in outer space. It is rich in graphics including diagrams, design drawings, digital renderings, and photographs of models and operational designs.

Many scientific papers and popular articles have been written on the topic of space tourism, describing everything from expected market sizes to the rules of 3-dimensional microgravity football. But what would it actually feel like to be a tourist in space, to be hurled into orbit on top of a controlled explosion, to float around in a spacecraft, and to be able to look down on your hometown from above the atmosphere? Space tourism is not science fiction anymore, Michel van Pelt tells us, but merely a logical step in the evolution of space flight. Space is about to be opened up to more and more people, and the drive behind this is one of the most powerful economic forces: tourism. Van Pelt describes what recreational space travel might look like, and explains the required space technology, the medical issues, astronaut training, and the possibilities of holidays to destinations far, far away. This is a book for everyone who has ever dreamed of traveling to space: a dream which, according to van Pelt, may not be so far from becoming a reality. Consider it the armchair traveler's guide to the coming boom in space tourism.