The Cato Institute, ProSpace and the Space Frontier Foundation are

Space News reported on January 15 that "senior Nasa space station officials" will meet in Moscow in February to discuss Russian plans to fly US citizen Dennis Tito to the ISS. The reason for this was given as: "Russian space officials recently informed Nasa in writing of a plan to fill the Soyuz capsule's vacant third seat with paying customers during routine missions."

NASA has recently admitted that the X-34 project, touted with the X-33 as the route to reducing launch costs, is at an impasse. Readers will remember that in 1995, as a result of the great success of the DC-X reusable rocket funded by the Defence Department, NASA announced its own RLV program - with the X-33 and X-34 reusable rockets as its centre-pieces. Both were to start a series of progressive demonstration flights in 1999, leading on to low-cost launch vehicles.

Just to prove that Mike Kelly, CEO of Kelly Space & Technology, isn't the only one getting a little press attention lately (GQ Magazine, September 2000), founder of Space Renaissance Inc and the Space Tourism Society John Spencer has recently been profiled by The Argonauts, a web magazine focussing on adventure travel.

It is now more than 6 months since Mr Goldin promised in front of a plenary session of the 1999 Space Frontier Foundation Conference to put NASA's space tourism report on NASA's web-site. But he has still not done so.

A surprising number of "special reports" on the 21st century published in newspapers and magazines fail even to mention the possibility of space tourism - which shows just how blind they are. That's because the growth of space tourism is going to be a "core change" in human society through the 21st century, as the spread of air travel world-wide was a core change of 20th century society. (It would be an interesting project for a student (perhaps studying the history of technology?) to survey and record how inaccurate these turn-of-the-century articles were.)

Two students in the Faculty of Tourism at Bournemouth University in England carried out surveys relating to space tourism in the 1998-99 academic year. (In a sign of the times, both students also published their work on the World Wide Web.)

In a July 14, 1999, speech to the Washington Space Business Round Table (reported in -Space News_, August 2, p 15) FAA Associate Administrator for Commercial Space Transportation Patricia Grace Smith laid out her vision of converting space transportation "...into a real mode of transportation". By this she means reaching the situation "... when a multitude of entrepreneurs will open space to all kinds of activities: thrill-rides, vacationers, industry and even trips to the Moon and beyond."

The team that produced the historic NASA/STA report, General Public Space Travel and Tourism, has now published Volume 2 - Workshop Proceedings, NASA/CP-1999-209146, dated February 1999.

The November/December 1998 issue of "STA Spacetrans", the newsletter of the Space Transportation Association, describes the first time that a NASA Administrator spoke out formally and positively in public about space tourism.