Why I wouldn't go to the International Space Station even if it were free

It's not a case of "scornful dog eat dirty pudding" as they say in Jamaica but, rather, the result of reading David Kushner's eye-opening September 2008 Wired magazine article about the training requirements for the $30 million dollar 10-day-long trip of a lifetime (note that that's the price the most recent erstwhile space tourist paid; the next ticket could be as much as $45 million).

Highlights:

• You have to spend up to eight months living at the grueling cosmonaut training camp in Zvyozdny Gorodok, aka Star City. Put it this way: it's not the Four Seasons. Wrote Kushner about the cosmonaut-tourist wannabes, "They live in cramped dormitories ... which look more YMCA than 'Star Trek.' They slip and slide down frozen walkways past dilapidated Soviet structures. They subsist on cafeteria food slathered in mayo. They bury themselves in textbooks or ride 'vomit comets' and centrifuges."

• Charles Simonyi, the former chief software architect of Microsoft who stayed at the camp from September 2006 to March 2007 to train for his subsequent ride, told Kushner, "It's like going to a monastery. You have a small bag and a toilet kit and move into a dorm. You have to live very simply."

• Said the fourth client to take the trip, Anousheh Ansari, "You can't count on hot water. A lot of time, the water that comes out is dark brown and starts lightening up only after 20 minutes."

• Kushner wrote, "It's one thing to adjust to life in Star City — but quite another to endure the confounding, confining, and sometimes just plain goofy training regimen. The first challenge is the language .... All of the instructions, instrumentation and communications in space will be in Russian. So, for four hours a day, Garriott and Halik [the next two passengers to go up] slave over fat, dusty language books in class, then tote them back ... to study more at night."

Excuse me — but one trip through med school was more than enough misery for a lifetime.

I'll pass.

Here's a link to a photo gallery that accompanies the Wired article.