Vehicles and hotel space

Space Adventures is working with organizations that are pushing forward on vehicles capable of making suborbital flights. "Several of them are further along than probably most people realize. The people who fly on suborbital vehicles are just as much explorers as they are tourists," Anderson said.

Anderson said the business of taking passengers up to the edge of space in specially equipped craft can happen in three to five years, with hundreds of people then flying suborbital trajectories every year.

Ortega said that Space Adventures is working with several large corporations and individuals ready to make both suborbital and orbital passenger travel a reality. Announcements about spaceports, vehicles under construction and other people who'll be making orbital sojourns are in the offing, he said.

"We see Tito's flight as a spark that ignited the fire," Ortega said.

U.S. company Spacehab is set to build the Enterprise module, the space station's first truly commercial unit. This segment could be useful to tour operators in numerous ways, perhaps converted into condominium-like living quarters specially geared for sightseeing stopovers.

Spacehab projects that Enterprise could be ready as early as 2003.

SPACEHAB's planned Enterprise module, which could serve as a mini-hotel, keeping ISS tourists out of the way of on-the-job astronauts.

Star wars

Needless to say, Dennis Tito is a star on the rise, at least according to ardent supporters of a blossoming space tourism market. Just how Tito got his star power status, however, is in some dispute.

Space Adventures claims to have brokered Tito's flight to the ISS. But not so fast, retorts Jeffrey Manber, president of MirCorp.

It was MirCorp -- a joint venture between the Gold & Appel Transfer SA holding company and Mir builder RSC Energia -- who worked out an early deal with Russia to get Tito onboard Mir.

"We brought him to the Mir and then our contract had a 'best efforts' to bring him to the ISS, and we did," Manber told SPACE.com.

As the company's name indicates, MirCorp's original charter was to market the Mir space station. However, the Russian government's decision to dump Mir also sent MirCorp planning into a tailspin.

MirCorp module

"After Tito...first we can see this market exists, and it must be nurtured as any new market needs a location, needs investments...and there will be future customers," Manber said. "We are proud to have truly created this market and shown people that it is time to move beyond government controlled programs."

Manber said that MirCorp is working on a new module to help foster the space tourism market.

"The next step is to develop our own module and have a location for the next tourists. This will be done commercially with investors. This is what we are doing now," he said.

"The flight of Tito shows us all how the Russian space industry is determined to survive despite the absence of funds from any government source. It is way past the time to continue to believe that the Russian federal government can honor its space station commitments."

Manber said, on one level, Tito is an expression of everything that MirCorp have maintained since its inception. "Non-traditional sources of funding will be needed to continue government space programs," he said.

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