, is now revered in space tourism circles for becoming the first person to personally pay for travel into orbit. However, even with Tito coughing up a purported $20 million for his roundtrip fare, that's far from a bustling space business. "Keep in mid that the first trickle in a flash flood doesn't ever look like much," said Chuck Lauer, a real-estate developer and president of Peregrine Properties.
"For 50 years or so, we've been a spacefaring civilization. But this is the first time that the decision to take money out of your own pocket and spend it outside the biosphere has happened," Lauer said.
Consumer discretionary spending is key for migrating off the planet, Lauer said. The consumer economy is going to provide the monies to transform space into an exciting and fun place for commercial entertainment. Even reentry as a recreational sport is not out of the question, he predicted.
"It's not the technology. It is the regulatory environment" that is holding back space tourism progress, Lauer said. And that regulatory environment "has got to catch up, and it's got to catch up quick," but not squeeze out creative entrepreneurial ideas, he said.
Playing monopoly
There is no doubt that space tourism is a word that may still be taboo in some quarters, said Tidal McCoy, chairman of STA. "Indeed, the Russians placed the first man in space and now the first tourist in space," he said. "This is an honor that could have been ours in the United States. But so it goes."
Space tourism expert, Patrick Collins, a professor of economics at Azabu University in Japan, had sharp words for NASA's bashing of public space travel by the agency's current chief-in-charge, Daniel Goldin, and scolded aerospace contractors too.
Goldin "bullied, bribed, blustered and lied," Collins said, attempting to block Dennis Tito's trek to the International Space Station in April 2001.
Also standing guilty for not promoting space tourism are major aerospace firms, both here and abroad, Collins said. "The problem is that space agencies are monopolies," he said. "So all the major space companies receive very substantial incomes from the space agencies. So they can't do a thing. Once you have a monopoly, you have no independent viewpoint."
"The thing that is frustrating is that, as taxpayers, we pay vast amounts of money to space agencies, something like $20 billion a year," Collins told SPACE.com. "None of that money is used for this. Even spending a few million dollars a year dedicated to tourism would create wonders."
Next page: A promising RLV tested last week
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