Sure, you'd love to join Dennis Tito in space but you're a bit short on the $20 million? Believe it or not, you can experience the rigors of space travel with earthbound adventures that are nearly as effective at busting your inner ear, squeezing your guts and dazzling your eyes as the real thing.

Virginia-based Space Adventures, the company that helped put Tito in orbit, has attracted nearly 1,000 customers eager to feel the force of supersonic flight and fun of zero-gravity. The four "travel tiers" the company offers begin with terrestrial tours to Russian and American space centers, move up to gravity-free flights aboard a Russian "Vomit Comet" aircraft and peak with 80,000-foot (24,385-meter) flights aboard high-altitude Russian fighter jets (MiGs).

"We had a 76-year-old woman fly a MiG 25," said Larry Ortega of Space Adventures. "It was not an adrenaline rush for her or an achievement. It was, for her, an event of awe and inspiration and beauty."

At that altitude, you can see 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) of Earth in any direction and the planet's curvature -- for $12,595. You have to pass a physical. You wear a partial pressure airsuit. You travel at Mach 2.5.

"It's really the beginning," said Bob Haltermann of the Space Transportation Administration in Virginia. "And I think it's poignant or ironic maybe that 40 years the Russians orbited the first man and 40 years later they orbit the first space tourist.

"That's competition and it's sorely needed on this side in the United States. Hopefully it's a clarion call for this country to organize and get ready for the charge."

The suborbital flights that Space Adventures offers depend in part upon just that competitive factor -- entrants in an engineering race called the X PRIZE. The $10 million prize money is an incentive, but basically most of the 20 companies involved -- including frontrunners Kelly Space and Technology, Pioneer Rocketplane Inc. and Scaled Composites Inc. -- really just want to get to space without NASA's help.

The prize goes to the team that can carry two people to 62 miles above Earth twice in two weeks without the use of government funds. And there will be no shortage of customers for that opportunity. Tens of thousands of people have approached Space Adventures to learn more about suborbital flight tours. More than 100 have said they want to fly, 67 have made a deposit and seven accounts are fully paid.

Space Adventures vows not to send anyone up on anything less than a highly reliable and safe vehicle and plans to announce two firms and sponsors with which it will partner later this year.

Without Dennis Tito's flight, none of this would have happened, Ortega said.

"It has proven the ability for an exciting civilian space flight, non-government-funded spaceflight, to generate media impressions," he said. "And those impressions are critical for us if we want to be able to sell sponsorships.

"It's fundamental business marketing 101 but there is no way to research that," he said. Until now.

There are dozens of resellers of Space Adventure tours worldwide and the group is "in discussions" with a large online travel agency, Ortega said.

Space Adventures also is ready to broker more flights aboard Soyuz spacecraft, Ortega said, but he refused to name names. "We are working with many corporate customers and we let them reveal what we are doing with them," he said. For now, there are no deposits in hand, he said.

"It's a very difficult search. You have to get people who have $20 million and have six months available to train and learn Russian," he said.

Flyers also must have the right temperament -- you must be studious and disciplined and cannot be obnoxious, difficult or mercurial in any way, he said. "If Dennis Tito was not Dennis Tito, it's my full impression that after two months the Russians would have politely asked him to leave."

And Space Adventures promises the adventure, not the actual flight. "The proof is when people come in show up for their training," Ortega said. "Are you really going to be there every morning at 8 a.m.? No drinking Monday to Friday?"

The company's revenue focus is suborbital jaunts, not flights aboard the Soyuz or to the International Space Station.

Obviously, none of those flights are cheap. Here's the bargain basement -- about $190 will buy you a behind-the-scenes tour of NASA's Kennedy Space Center. Want an astronaut to conduct the tour? The price goes up to $3,500 but you can bring up to 30 people and divide the price.

Space Adventures' most popular ground tour is a visit to space shuttles at NASA's Kennedy Space Center.

There are plenty of schemes, dreams and start-ups, past and present, aiming for commercial trips toward the stars. But the key in the future will be spaceports and a spaceport authority, experts say, and the government should still play a role.

"We want NASA to develop the technologies not for the next space shuttle but technologies that could be picked up on by private sector who could build a family of vehicles to accommodate the whole spectrum of space tourism," said Haltermann.

Just as NASA's predecessor, the National Advisory Council for Aeronautics, developed technologies that sped up our commercial aviation industry, the present space agency should develop airframes, airfoils, skins and controls for spaceplanes, said Haltermann. Like an aeroballistic plane that could fly high into the atmosphere, gather oxygen and combine it with transported hydrogen to make fuel, fire a rocket motor, coast up to a triangle peak and then angle down with landing engines to a conventional airport anywhere on Earth within an hour.

That's just one concept. Other ideas include a commercial module that would serve as a mini-hotel serviced by visiting Soyuz spacecraft, said Frank Sietzen of the National Space Society. (Sietzen, a launch industry specialist, was SPACE.com's Washington bureau chief in 1999.)

The whole industry will shake out in the next five to 10 years, he said, with flights to space hotels costing in the range of $200,000 to $300,000.

"It's going to be millionaires for awhile," Sietzen said, "but eventually it'll be akin to Antarctic trips and safaris.