The DVD "Gaia Selene: ...saving the Earth by colonising the Moon" by Screenwriter and Producer Charles Proser makes an unanswerable case that investing in developing space-faring capabilities such as large-scale solar energy and wireless power transmission, helium 3 collection and utilisation, and the use of other non-terrestrial resources including near-Earth asteroids and comets would pay a good return in the longer run.

For advocates of space tourism, the year 2004 can be conveniently summed up in one word: "SpaceShipOne". That project could hardly have gone better: after just three powered test-flights, starting on the centenary of the Wright brothers' first flight, SpaceShipOne reached space three times in 2004, thereby winning the Ansari X-Prize of $10 million.

The publishers’ blurb says it well:

President Bush has chosen Sean O'Keefe to be the next Nasa administrator; he’s expected to start formally early in the new year after the final Senate ratification. O’Keefe is currently Deputy Director of the US government's Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Earlier in 2001 he was responsible for denying Nasa the extra $5 billion that it requested (on top of a long series of earlier budget over-runs) toward the International Space Station ( ISS). A professional public sector manager, O’Keefe has said of the project “...technical excellence at any cost is not an acceptable approach....”

The Space Transportation Association based in Washington DC is one of the organisations putting most effort into changing official attitudes to space tourism, having been responsible for such historic steps as initiating and realising the historic NASA/STA joint study: General Public Space Travel and Tourism and holding the first space tourism conference in the USA (see below).

SATMS? ISFO? STC? No idea what they mean? Are you behind the times - or what?

Knowing as we do that passenger space travel, and particularly space tourism, is going to become the largest, economically most important activity in space, we are pleased to recognise that 1998 has been an exceptionally good year, with a number of key successes.

As Space Future turns one year old today, the two goals of space tourism and space power which are key to paying for human expansion into space, are looking better than ever before. Both topics are substantially more widely accepted today than even one year ago, though there's still a long way to go.