A private spaceflight industry, dubbed "new space" by some of its proponents, is steadily emerging from the dusty desert hangars and closely guarded office-park high bays that incubated it, ready to leap off launch pads across the globe into a role self-consciously reminiscent of civil aviation 80 years ago.

Private spending on space-related activities already exceeds that of governments, mostly for building, launching, operating and using commercial communications satellites, according to a new Space Foundation report that found only $70 billion of the $180 billion in worldwide space revenues comes from governments.

Since the beginning of the space age, as the smoke cleared from World War II, telecommunications has been the cash cow of commercial space. But now a handful of startup companies--many of them drawing on financial "angels" who made nonspace fortunes in the computer and computer-communications businesses--is vying to tap a new market of wealthy thrill-seekers who can afford to spend as much as a quarter of a million dollars for a few minutes of weightless and out-of-this-world views from the black sky of space.

Spurred by the $10-million Ansari X Prize, some two dozen little companies tried to build a rocketship that could take at least two paying passengers on suborbital flights at least twice in two weeks. (The X Prize itself was modeled on the $25,000 Orteig Prize that lured Charles Lindbergh out over the Atlantic in 1927 in the "Spirit of St. Louis.") The X Prize winner--Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites--is hard at work on an upgrade of its two-stage-to-orbit SpaceShipOne that British airline executive Richard Branson hopes will begin taking paying customers above 100 km. in 2009.

However, Branson's SpaceShipTwo and his Virgin Galactic spaceline aren't the only players in the suborbital space tourism game. Oklahoma City-based Rocketplane Kistler is working on a modified executive jet with the same goal in mind, while XCOR--located, like Rutan's Scaled Composites, next to the Mojave (Calif.) Airport runway--is building its own rocket-powered plane. And there are others (see p. 46).

They are encouraged in their business plans by the success of Space Adventures, the Virginia travel agency that has arranged four private flights to the International Space Station at a reported $20 million a pop, with another scheduled next March when software pioneer Charles Simyoni is to lift off in the extra "taxi seat" on the Russian Soyuz TMA-10 that will serve as a fresh lifeboat for the three-member ISS crew.

The promoters in the nascent industry (and presumably their customers) prefer the term "private space explorer" over "space tourist." Regardless of how they are portrayed, future space travelers who pay their own way will eventually have more destinations to select than the ISS or a quick peek above the atmosphere. For example, Las Vegas real-estate entrepreneur Robert Bigelow is moving ahead with his plans to orbit inflatable habitats for tourists and other private space explorers, including microgravity researchers and perhaps manufacturers (see p. 50).

Russia is already modifying its Soyuz vehicle to give paying passengers a smoother ride to destinations like those Bigelow is planning (AW&ST Oct. 9, p. 38). The two U.S. companies that won NASA support for their efforts to develop alternate routes to the ISS also are talking to Bigelow about using human-rated versions of their robotic cargo vehicles--the SpaceX Dragon and Rocketplane Kistler K-1--to deliver passengers to the orbiting facilities envisioned by Bigelow (AW&ST Oct. 9, p. 66).

As the Dragon and K-1 demonstrate, the new marketplace isn't limited to paying human passengers. A whole set of business plans--for everything from small satellite launches to suborbital package delivery across continents and oceans--is making the rounds of venture capitalists, investment bankers and other potential funders.

Nor do the companies building the final vehicles themselves represent the entire industry. If Scaled Composites and Rocketplane Kistler are the new-age space primes, a second tier of suppliers is also emerging that specializes in life support, spacesuits and other subsystems that the rocket-makers will need to keep their customers alive (see p. 52).

Ultimately the men and women, in and out of government, who are trying to put together the infrastructure that will accommodate the next generation of space travelers hope there's a commercial space sector capable enough to bring the cost down for everyone: It happened in commercial aviation, with some government help, and a lot of people are working to make it happen again.

"As we go forward with the Vision for Space Exploration, it emphatically is our duty to encourage and leverage nascent commercial space capabilities," says NASA Administrator Michael Griffin. "Not only is it the right thing to do in a country whose economic system is rooted in free-market concepts, but it will also be a necessity if we are to achieve the goals set out for the U.S. civil space program."