“Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God,” wrote the late novelist Kurt Vonnegut. To take God up on one of those lessons, all it takes is a drive to Chattanooga and $150,000 in cash.

As of mid-May, West Oehmig of Tennessee Valley Travel Agency had four prospective space travelers interested in suborbital flights, including an area doctor who had previously climbed Mount Everest and for whom nothing but space travel would do. Still, “nobody has plunked down $150,000 with me yet,” says Oehmig, who recently became one of the nation’s 47 agents authorized to peddle space tourism under Virgin Galactic, the brand owned and run by prolific British entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson. Already, reservations for the first 100 or so flights have been filled—mostly with Branson’s friends and family, as well as space professionals from around the world.

For the price of a suburban cottage, Oehmig offers two days of physical testing and an information seminar, culminating on the third day with a three-hour foray into suborbital space. Virgin Galactic reserves the right to turn down applicants whose health is deemed inadequate, with full refund, of course. Six lucky passengers and two pilots will be stuffed into aviation innovator Burt Rutan’s soon-to-be-unveiled spacecraft, which in 90 seconds will be whisked to 50,000 feet, or 62 miles, by an airplane from Mojave desert, and then detached. There should be plenty of windows in Rutan’s craft from which to see the Earth during 10 minutes of weightlessness, which Oehmig swears will seem like an eternity to those who have never done it. Once the time is up, the spacecraft will feather its way down like a shuttlecock in badminton until it hits the atmosphere, and then the pilot will take over. The G-forces, stronger upon return, will max out at three units, while top speed would be about Mach 3.3. It takes almost two hours to return to Earth.

Building upon the success of Rutan’s SpaceShip One project in 2004, Branson and company decided to go with suborbital flights, similar to what Alan Sheppard experienced in 1961, because going any farther requires much more energy—and money—to penetrate the Earth’s atmosphere upon re-entry. For the next best alternative, space purists will have to pony up about $20 million to go up to the International Space Station on a Russian Soyuz rocket, says Vanderbilt University science communications chief and longtime NASA insider Rick Chappel. A Shuttle flight, if NASA even did space tourism, would cost $50 million for each of the eight people on board.

As he prepares for a roadshow at country clubs in Nashville’s Belle Meade and in Memphis, Oehmig says he will work with other travel agents who refer clients to him, but “they’ll have to have some pretty damn good credentials.” To become Tennessee’s only space travel agent—there were 160 applicants nationwide—Oehmig says he made an investment in Virgin Galactic, but doesn’t say how much. He is equally reserved about the potential margins he may land when people begin signing up: “It’s substantially less than the usual 10%-20% commission” Oehmig says he and his son Lewis get when sending members of the general public on exclusive castle tours of Scotland.

But money is not the point. Until recently, Oehmig could not fathom commercial space travel becoming a reality in his lifetime. When it did, Oehmig jumped into the flight simulator at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida to get as close as he could to the stars. He emerged an agent for the most peculiar travel suggestion in the land.

Tennessee Valley Travel