From March 20th to 22nd, a conference on space tourism was held in Bremen, Germany (Moon astronaut Buzz Aldrin was also there). Here, concepts were presented reaching far into the future. Interestingly, a majority of Americans, Germans and Japaneese have expressed an interest to fly into space as tourists at least once in their lives, provided the trip is affordable. That, however, will take quite some time - momentarily we have ticket prices only Bill Gates can pay. They are around 10.000.000 $ per nose (if you don't have one, you fly for free, I suppose. Bill Gates has one, I believe). Building an infrastructure would take many billions of $s - ignoring for a moment the fact that we have no launch capacity for large masses.

Do we have alternatives - are there "in-between" steps?

A precondition for any kind of tourism activity, space or elsewhere, is a high degree of security. Tourists expect a fair chance of returning home (a weak point in Jurassic Park, if you remember - can kill the whole idea). The tour operator wants to make a profit. Last but not least, everybody should get a fair chance to fly, not just millionairs.

(Hotel study of the Shimitzu company)

The solution might be a lottery held world-wide, offering fly-along opportunities for ongoing missions. Anybody can participate with a $ 5 sweepstake - and with equal chances. If 2 million people were to participate each time (sounds reasonable if one consideres that the STARTRECK community is already much bigger), than that's §$ 10,000,000. If space agencies were to pursue a low-budged rocket technology, than that alone would be well enought to pay for the whole cost of the flight of a regular crew and payload. The lottery approach would give people worldwide a chance - from Brazil to France. It would be truely inspiring.

For safety reasons, we would give hybrids a preference.

I think this is a viable idea which does not take much preparation. It is just an organisational question. Nothing needs to be newly developed. Perhaps some Russian space managers are listening .....

Another idea:

Many people dream of flying into space and seeing the earth just once from space, or of experiencing weightlesness. For that, it is not necessary to go into orbit. Quite to the contrary, many people probably wouldn't even want to spend a week or so in crowded quarters under reduced hygienical conditions etc. Many of us like to ride a rollar coster now and then, but who would want to go for a full day non-stop? In a sense, it is like flying in an airplane - take-off and landing are the interesting parts of the trip - the rest becomes booring quickly, despite it being a truely amazeing thing when you think about it.

Let's assume we launch vertically with a 4000 m/s velocity. This would take us to a height of 900 km, that's twice as high as the planned orbit for the new space station Freedom and more than 3 times as high as the typical Space Shuttle orbit of 250 to 300 km. You would really get a splendid rare view of Mother Earth. The flight would take appx. 980 sec. or 15 min. Maybe 3 minutes would go into the launch phase. The rest would be "free flight" including perhaps up to 8 min of weightlessnes, until you have to head back to your seat and prepare for hitting the atmosphere. At 4000 m/s this would be definitely be unpleasant, so the reentry path should be slightly curved. (What we look for here is a more principal discussion without too much detail).

4000 m/s is just half of orbital velocity which means that we will need just 1/4 the energy of getting into space. Hence, we just have 25% of the fuel expenditure per tourist of an orbit-born vehicle. What is even more important - the vehicle could be much simpler. No need for docking etc. Such a rocket might even be a single-stage LOX/Kerosine vehicle, i.e. no need for difficult-to-handle hydrogen. Besides, we would not need a costly space infra structure such as hotels etc.

I think this is an idea worth exploring. Which university would like to do some screening calculations ???