The first symposium on Personal Access to Space held by the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) in Arcachon, France, May 28-30, 2008, was a mixture of both the encouraging and the discouraging.

For the first time in Nasa’s more than 40-year history, Nasa funds have been used to ask US citizens whether they would like to take a trip to space - and the results strongly endorse Space Future's position.

Eight excellent papers concerning various aspects of space tourism were presented to an audience of about 100 people in the session "Space Tourism and other Novel Space Applications" held on October 7th at the 50th IAF Congress in Amsterdam. (There were no other topics.)

Two students in the Faculty of Tourism at Bournemouth University in England carried out surveys relating to space tourism in the 1998-99 academic year. (In a sign of the times, both students also published their work on the World Wide Web.)

The largest international space meeting each year is the annual Congress of the International Astronautical Federation ( IAF), the 49th of which took place this year from September 28 - October 2 in Melbourne, Australia.

The Space Frontier Foundation, which has been pressing eloquently for better and more commercially-targeted efforts to develop space, recognises space tourism as one of the activities that could play a major role in generating the financial support needed to develop space. At this year's 7th Annual Conference, Tom Rogers, President of the Space Transportation Association in Washington DC (among his various hats) chaired a panel on Space Adventure Tourism during the afternoon of Saturday October 10th at the Sheraton Gateway Hotel, L.A. airport.