Not 'gonna be a long, long time' till you can be a rocket man

The International Space Station is not exactly the Waldorf-Astoria. And a Russian Soyuz capsule will never boast the creature comforts of a stretch limo.

But that doesn't bother an increasing number of well-heeled executives and celebrities willing to pay millions of dollars and spend a few months training in exchange for a quick trip to orbit.

Welcome to the dawn of space tourism, where opportunities to view spaceship Earth from aboveare rare, visions of the future are grand, and Everyman seems willing to shed planet Earth, if briefly. The latest "tour-o-naut" to buckle up and place his tray table in the upright, locked position is South African venture capitalist Mark Shuttleworth. He launched with two cosmonauts on a space-station resupply flight yesterday from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. He is the second fare-paying visitor to the station, following in the bootsteps of Dennis Tito, a US businessman who took that same trip last year.

They aren't alone. "Another eight to 10 people have expressed interest" in a Soyuz trip to the space station, notes Tereza Predescu of Space Adventures, an Arlington, Va., company that arranges the flights.

Russia's next resupply flight is scheduled for October, and two Americans are vying for the passenger seat: former National Aeronautics and Space Administration associate administrator Lori Garver and boy-band 'N Sync's Lance Bass. Aerosmith rocker Steven Tyler also is reportedly eyeing a future flight.

"There is a lot of pent-up demand, at least emotionally" among a large number of people to journey into space, says John Logsdon, of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

For example, in 2000, Harris Interactive surveyed Americans' and Canadians' willingness to travel into space as tourists. Overall, 86 percent of the 2,022 respondents would be interested in a trip to space. Extrapolating from the results, Space Adventures, which commissioned the study, estimates that 10,000 people a year would be willing to pay $100,000 apiece for a quick up-and-down suborbital flight, a la Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard. That translates into a $1 billion-a-year business.

If they received the trip as a promotion or gift, 80 percent of the respondents said they'd take an intercontinental space-plane, 70 percent would take a space-station tour or an orbital flight, and 74 percent would be willing to take a suborbital journey.

For space tourism to truly take off, however, several things must happen, says Frank Sietzen of the Space Transportation Association, an aerospace-industry group in Arlington, Va.

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