Dole Food Products Inc, the world's largest fresh fruit company, is offering tickets for a sub-orbital space flight to winners of a sweep-stake it is organising.

This article appeared in the business and finance section, not the human interest section. Next milestone is for it to appear in the travel section, where future space tourists will lust for the ultimate "get away from it all" vacation.

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.)

Over 100 people from around the world gathered at the Space Transportation Association's "Going Public" Space Tourism conference in Washington, D.C. to learn more about the issues inhibiting space tourism from becoming a viable endeavor.

The 2nd International Symposium on Space Tourism took place in Bremen from April 21-23, organised by Professor Uwe Apel of Bremen Technical University as Chair of the Program Committee, and Hartmut Mueller of Space Tours Gmbh as Chair of the Host Committee. Among the 26 papers presented, several are destined to become recognised as 'classic' papers in the field, establishing an important new element of accepted wisdom among professionals in the field, or creating what will be seen as a milestone in the future.

The Space Tourism Pavillion will be a feature at this year's Tomorrow's World Live exhibition, organised and sponsored by the BBC Tomorrow's World programme, the UK's most popular science and technology show.

The newly formed Space Travel and Tourism devision of the STA will be hosting a space tourism conference in Washington this coming June, entitled:

Over the past few weeks, two self-made billionaire businessmen have established companies with the stated objective of playing roles in the commercial space tourism industry that is becoming increasingly widely recognised as the true future of space activities.

"October Sky" is a delightful film based on the autobiographical book "Rocket Boys" by Homer Hickham Jr, which tells of his inspiration as a teenager by the launch of Sputnik 1 in October 1957. As a result he decided he wanted to build rockets, although his father wanted him to follow in his footsteps as a coal-miner. Encouraged by his school-teacher and his mother, Homer began building model rockets with some friends, and through persistence they ultimately won a national science competition - and scholarships that allowed them to escape from coal-mining. (Homer himself ended up working for NASA, from where he recently retired.)

The following are events open to the public that concern space tourism