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We started with a search using the phrase "commercial space travel," which pointed us in the right direction. Among the results for those terms were a pair of sites in Yahoo!'s Civilian Space Travel category. That sounded promising! We immediately launched an investigation. Sure enough, the category was full of sites relating to shooting Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Public into orbit. We eagerly browsed through resources such as Discovery.com's Space Tourist, a page that describes two companies that intend on taking passengers into space, plus details
the plans for a "Lunar Hilton." We also checked out the exciting X Prize Foundation, which is awarding 10 million bucks to "the team that designs the first private spaceship that successfully launches three humans to a sub-orbital altitude of 100 km on two consecutive flights within two weeks." The X Prize folks are even sponsoring quarterly sweepstakes that offer sub-orbital flights for the lucky winners. That might be a cheap way to almost make it to space. Of course, the best news came when we found a link within Civilian Space Travel to Yahoo!'s Travel Operators > Space Tours category. As of this writing,
there are no less than six companies that want to blast you into space. We quickly learned that Space Adventures will charge you $98,000 for a sub-orbital flight, but that's not exactly outer space, so we pressed on. The U.K. company Starchaser will charge $200,000 to be the second astronaut on their X Prize entry. Or, even better, you could win a spot as the third passenger. Those were the most accurate prices we could find. Our advice: Bookmark the category and keep an eye on it. As the first civilian space tour gets closer, set prices will appear and, hopefully, they'll come back down to Earth.
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