"The point we are making as a company is that not everyone needs a big mainframe computer to do what they need to do," Fleeter said. "Some people just need a Palm Pilot and some people just need a calculator."

Fleeter is banking on commercial space ventures, unheard of during the Apollo era, becoming more accessible to more creative, less traditional types.

Aero Astro has successfully cultivated this market, having built several small satellites using the same off-the-shelf technology found in today’s portable computers and cell phones.

At the company’s 7,000-square-foot (650-square-meter) building in the heart of Northern Virginia’s technology corridor, his staff huddles in the conference room, munching on banana bread baked by Rick’s mother. Their meetings are spirited. They are the brain trust that brings a product from concept to completion, often using local machinist shops to build their small spacecraft.

Some of the smaller satellites weigh less than 2 pounds (1 kilogram) and can fit on your lap. What’s more, they are cheap, costing as little as $200,000. Some of the bigger birds built by such companies as Hughes Aircraft and Space/Systems Loral can weigh as much as 8,000 pounds (3,630 kilograms) and cost up to several million dollars.

Fleeter stands next to communications satellite dubbed "Bitsy."

These are the words of a man who rides one of his six bikes to work everyday. A few years back, he took several colleagues and a 3-pound (1.4-kilogram) prototype of a satellite and peddled close to 500 miles (800 kilometers) from Colorado Springs, Colorado to Albuquerque, New Mexico to show the small spacecraft to officials at Philips Laboratory.

He also bicycled with a colleague in the wee hours of the morning to get to a board meeting 50 miles (80 kilometers) away. "I wanted to get a ride in before the meeting," he said.

An unpretentious approach for a man with a Ph.D. in engineering, with a focus on thermodynamics from Stanford University.

After graduating, he went the usual route of an engineer, having worked at Defense Systems Inc., TRW Space & Technology and the Jet Propulsion Lab at Caltech.

It was at these jobs that he realized space technology was stuck in a time warp. "I felt stifled," Fleeter said.

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Faced with shrinking budgets, and a technology-driven society that demands cutting-edge products at a fast clip, aerospace has become "ripe, overripe for innovation".

Fleeter said his company’s "real challenge is to put enough of these little satellites into the hands of enough clever people" to see what they come up with.

One of the more innovative ventures is Encounter 2001, a program founded by Aero Astro. The company plans to offer customers a little legacy in space by flying music, writing, photos and the DNA of 4 million people into orbit for under $50.

Fleeter personally clipped Clarke’s locks to send a sample of the futurist’s DNA into orbit.

Fleeter clips hair samples from Arthur C. Clarke so he may send the futurist's DNA into space.

Another company, called Celestis, sends small samples of a deceased person’s ashes into orbit, eventually burning up when it reenters Earth’s atmosphere.

Fleeter saw a whole new market with Encounter because "you don’t have to die" to send a piece of yourself into space.

And it’s not just out-of-the-ordinary ventures that Fleeter believes will grow.

"Companies like 3M and DuPont need it as well," he said. "You tell them they can do polymer research at zero gravity and they find out it's going to take years and years and millions of dollars, they aren’t interested."

"Big companies don’t have a big R&D (research and development) budget," he said.

Those projects can be left for the industry’s heavyweights working with NASA whose "mission is to do the next interesting thing."

Such as human spaceflight?

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"Human spaceflight is a little bit of a relic from the days when the computer was a big heavy thing and a human was relatively small, cheap and light," Fleeter said. "I don’t know if people are going to get over this, but they need to because it’s too expensive to send people into space."

"The cost of getting a kilogram into orbit hasn’t changed in 50 years," he said.

What puzzles him is "this idea that in order to explore space, a physical person has to go there."

"Why do we not think when we land a rover on Mars that it’s not human exploration of Mars?" he said.

Fleeter personally has no interest going into orbit. "Ninety-nine percent of people don’t realize that orbital travel is very uncomfortable."

Despite Tito’s plans, Fleeter believes that the future of space tourism will likely be in more economical suborbital flights. "Suborbital flight is a cool idea," he said. "I really think it’s going to be tourism in the next 10 or 20 years."

A handful of companies, including Arlington, Virginia-based Space Adventures, are planning on providing a one-week "vacation" which includes training at a launch site and ending in a 10- to 20-minute flight on a suborbital craft.

Travelers will be able to experience being launched on a rocket, moving in zero gravity, looking down on Earth to see the glow of the atmosphere and the pull of reentry and landing – all without the discomfort and risk of orbital flight.

"You get all the advantages without all of the disadvantages," Fleeter said. "That would get my adrenaline going."

But, Fleeter adds, "I would like to see a lot of people do it before I do it."