When colleagues ask Conor O'Kelly if he did anything interesting on his holidays, he can tell them that he flew to the edge of space and looked down on the Earth.
The 37-year-old chartered accountant from Dublin returns to his desk on Monday morning, fresh from his space tourism experience in Russia.
"It will take a lot to beat that," he said from his Skerries home yesterday.
"It was amazing, surreal and very serene. It's very hard to put words on it. I really got a sense that we were on the outside, looking down on Earth."
His adventure began in Russia at 11 a.m. on Thursday when he changed into a high-altitude suit and got into the cockpit of a MiG fighter jet with pilot, Mr Alexander Pavlov.
The aircraft holds the current world altitude and speed records and is used to train cosmonauts at the edge of space.
"We took off and started a gentle climb to about 35,000 feet. Then we accelerated and started a steep climb, breaking the sound barrier with a gentle shudder. It was very, very smooth," he recalled.
Soon they had climbed to 87,000 feet and were travelling at three times the speed of sound, with a clear view of the Earth.
"It was very much like you would see on TV. You could clearly see the curvature of the Earth and it was a magnificent kaleidoscope of blue. There was a thin, translucent glow from the Earth's atmosphere. It just looked like a big, blue, glowing ball.
"The sky above us was black and it was just very, very peaceful, very serene. There were none of the noises you would usually hear. It was a very strange sensation."
The entire trip took about 30 minutes, with about two minutes spent looking down at the Earth.
"It can be quite disorientating and a little uncomfortable because your body is very restricted," he said.
"You are very tightly strapped in for a start, and then there's the pressure you feel. You couldn't swing your head around. I reached for the camera and found that my arms and the camera felt three times heavier than normal."
About 50 people take tourist flights with the US Space Adventures company every year. The experience cost Mr O'Kelly $19,000, a sum within the reach of many people, he said.
