Dennis Tito, space tourist, returned to Earth after the experience of a lifetime. However, he does not want to make the trip a second time. Tito was quoted as saying, "I want other people to make it instead."

And so does NASA, or at least, a NASA study, released in 1998:

"This study concludes that serious national attention should now be given to activities that would enable the expansion of today's terrestrial space tourism businesses, and the creation of in-space travel and tourism businesses. Indeed, it concludes that, in time, it should become a very important part of our Country's overall commercial and civil space business-program structure. For it offers new personal and business opportunities that would capitalize upon our great and continuing human spaceflight public expenditures and make additional use of our reservoir of space professionals, facilities and institutions."

As we have said repeatedly, NASA administrator Dan Goldin promised on September 25, 1999, to post this report to the NASA website. That promise was kept to the barest minimum as the report is on the NASA website--but it cannot be found through a search engine. Catch-22: You can't find the report unless you know the URL; you can't know the URL, as it cannot be found.

As the public cannot possibly obtain this information, we conclude this report remains buried. Of course, spacefuture.com has a copy on our site. Please read General Public Space Tourism and Travel and draw your own conclusions.

Write your Congressperson. Write President Bush. Tell them you want to go to space and are willing to pay a reasonable fee for the priviledge. (Alas, not everyone has US$20 million in their back pocket.) With enough people waving enough dollars, our politicians are sure to take notice.

This issue cannot go ignored.