As SpaceX and other commercial entities enter the space industry, space travel for a broader audience will become more feasible. Since the early 1990s, tourism study has witnessed an ongoing conversation on space tourism, which mainly covers motivations of potential space tourists and their pricing expectations. This study takes a novel perspective by framing astronauts’ direct experiences as inputs to build a conceptual model of space travel experience. Through a combination of traditional qualitative analysis and computation-based linguistic analysis on 19,114 Tweets (2008-2018) posted by 36 astronauts, this study aims to address an important theoretical void: When people travel to outer space, what leisure experiences attached to orbital space travel could they have? We propose “amateur astronaut” as a transiting title from astronauts to space tourists, and suggest that space travel experience brings an overview effect as our core theoretical contributions of touristic attraction.