For Space Tourism, Race Is On

(AP)  If floating weightless and peering down on a shimmering-blue Earth sounds appealing, you might consider being a space tourist.

As long as you've got a fat wallet.

Two years after the first privately financed space flight jump-started a sleepy industry, more than a dozen companies are developing rocket planes to ferry ordinary rich people out of the atmosphere.

Several private companies will begin building their prototype vehicles this summer with plans to test fly them as early as next year. If all goes well, the first tourist could hitch a galactic joy ride late next year or 2008, pending approval by federal regulators.

Unlike the Cold War space race between the United States and Soviet Union that sent satellites into orbit and astronauts to the moon, this competition is bankrolled by entrepreneurs whose competition could one day make a blast into space cheap enough for the average Joe.

"This time, it's personal. This space race is about getting 'us' into space," said space historian Andrew Chaikin.

For now, commercial space travel remains an exclusive club.

Over the past few years, three tourists have paid a reported $20 million each to ride aboard a Russian rocket to the orbiting international space station.

A fourth would-be tourist, Lance Bass from the former boy band 'N Sync, did astronaut training, but failed to come up with money for the trip.

The three who made it spent about a week weightless and described the experience as "paradise" and "wondrous." The most thrilling part for millionaire U.S. scientist Gregory Olsen, who blasted off last year, was viewing the swirling Earth from the dark of space.

Prospective prices for the next round of personal space flights aren't so astronomical, a seat aboard one of the yet-to-be-built commercial spaceships will fetch between $100,000 to $250,000. Space entrepreneurs expect the price tag to drop once the market matures.

Tourists will get what they pay for.

Instead of days in space, the commercial spaceships under development will only reach suborbital space, a region about 60 miles up that is generally considered the beginning of the rest of the universe. Since the private spaceships lack the speed to go into orbit around Earth, the flights are essentially up and down experiences, lasting about two hours with up to five minutes of weightlessness.

It's more of a ride than those offered by several companies that use Boeing 727s to produce a half-minute of weightlessness through a series of maneuvers about 25,000 feet up. Those flights, which generally sell for about $3,000, never reach space.

"It's like an upside-down bungee jump," said John Logsdon, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. "There'll be a few moments to view the Earth and then you come right back down."

Here is a rundown of several companies that will start building their private spaceships this summer:

The biggest name is Virgin Galactic, a space tourism firm founded by British billionaire tycoon Richard Branson. Branson has partnered with Burt Rutan, whose SpaceShipOne in 2004 became the first private manned craft to reach space, to build a fleet of suborbital commercial spaceships called SpaceShipTwo.

SpaceShipTwo is about the size of a corporate Gulfstream jet that can hold six tourists and two crew members. Like SpaceShipOne, it will be powered by a hybrid rocket motor and use a "feathering" technique to glide back to Earth.

The design of SpaceShipTwo is complete and construction is slated for this summer with test flights scheduled for late next year. The project's $100 million first phase is financed by Branson's Virgin Group, said Virgin Galactic president Will Whitehorn.

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