One thing I didn't realize about Alan Shepard's original suborbital flight is that he experienced much higher G-forces on re-entry (11.5) than even astronauts coming back from the Moon (7), which explains why space tourism suborbital flights are just barely over the Kármán line
Basically every space peanut you drop on your lap while taking apogee selfies is going to leave a dent on the way back down, and you really want to latch that overhead bin
Another interesting facet of "space tourism" is that a sizeable fraction of people get bad motion sickness in space, and it's not predictable who will be affected. This wasn't discovered by the Americans until the Apollo program, when the capsule got big enough to move around in
Space sickness is measured on the Garn Scale, named after a Utah senator who weaseled his way onto a Space Shuttle flight and received sweet cosmic justice. One Garn is the "maximum level of space sickness that anyone can ever attain." en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_ada…
The space toilet, 4 inches across, is also a rich field for space tourism schadenfreude. For the Shuttle, "NASA built a simulator with a video camera in the hole; those training used a crosshair to learn how to position their bodies while other astronauts watched and made jokes."
According to John Young, NASA learned the hard way that the suction fan in the space toilet was underpowered on the first six-person Shuttle flight.
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