What Real People Want from Space

According to a recent space.com article, flights to space that now cost US$20 million per person may eventually drop to US$100,000.

This week is turning out to be very newsworthy for the space tourism industry. First, the world's second paying space passenger is set to fly on Thursday, April 25. Mark Shuttleworth, a South African dotcom multi-millionaire, is ready for launch on a Vostok rocket from the Baikonour Cosmodrome in Kazakstan. Colonel Yuri Pavlovich Gidzenko is the commander of the Taxi-3 mission, also was a member of the first crew on the International Space Station Expedition-1 mission. Lieutenant Colonel Roberto Vittori, from Rome, Italy, completes the team. He has over 2000 hours experience in over 40 different aircraft. Mark Shuttleworth has excellent companions for his trip to the ISS. Keep posted at the First African in Space website:

By Carol Pinchefsky and Peter Wainwright

According to an article in spacer.com, Mark Shuttleworth will become the world's second paying space tourist at the going rate of US$20 million. Or will he?

By Patrick Collins

Space Future's Patrick Collins has written the editorial for this week's Aviation Week and Space Technology. As always, he states that what passenger airline travel did for the 20th century, space tourism can do for the 21st.

Now that the previously suppressed Nasa report "General Public Space Travel and Tourism" is available on the Nasa web site, it bears looking at. Go to www.nasa.gov and type the words 'space tourism' into the search box. You may get more than you were expecting.

The very positive report on the feasibility of space tourism published by Nasa in March 1998 is now available via Nasa's web-site. Typing 'space tourism' into the search form brings it up as the 3rd reference, dated 25 July, 2001. This follows three and a half years during which Nasa administrator Goldin prevented it being publicly accessible.

by Alan Breakstone