Jaunted

So certain is it that space tourism will eventually become viable that the government is already starting to talk about regulating it. It seems a little early in the industry's development for that, and some analysts are expressing legitimate concerns about overeager bureaucrats interfering in areas they don't understand. On the other hand, regulators will mainly be focusing on Branson and Virgin Galactic for the foreseeable future, and that—like everything involving Branson—is guaranteed to be magic. Can you imagine some drab mid-level bureaucrat trying to deal with Branson's insanity? The entertainment value would almost be worth the broader risk.

We actually flagged Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo for you back in September because it represents a new strategy for making space tourism viable. Instead of charging millions of dollars to send someone to space every half-year, Virgin Galactic plans to ask customers to pay mere hundreds of thousands of dollars to travel suborbitally. Travelers wouldn't get to go to the space station, but they would travel 100km into the air, experiencing several minutes of weightlessness. Eventually funds from those flights will be fed into further developments, allowing space tourism companies to stretch outward.

So while there won't be any more uber-rich tourists traveling to the ISS any time soon, there will be lots of mildly rich tourists traveling almost to space. Baby steps!

[Photo: Virgin Galactic]

Related Stories:
· Russia: no space for space tourists [AP]
· SpaceShipTwo Roll Out [Virgin Galactic]
· Virgin Galactic [Jaunted]
· Space Tourism [Jaunted]