How to Become a True Space-Case

March 14, 2006 — -- If the ticket set you back no more than the cost of an airline flight to the opposite coast, would you be brave enough to ride a cutting-edge commercial spacecraft into, well, space?

According to initial estimates, tens of thousands of us would without hesitation, and in only a few years, when the first commercial passenger flights are slated to begin, you'll actually have a way to get there without NASA or the Russian space program.

The initial cost, however, is another matter, since the planned "fare" for a fairly short suborbital flight will be $200,000. Nevertheless, that's quite a bargain when you compare it to the $20 million Dennis Tito paid to ride a Russian Soyuz to orbit several years ago.

Then again, he was up there in orbit for days, while the first regular service to space would be suborbital -- which means riding up above 65 miles in altitude (above 330,000 feet), spending several minutes in zero gravity gaping at the star field above and Earth below, and then falling back into re-entry.

No orbits, in other words.

Catch John Nance on "Good Morning America" Tuesday, March 14, when he'll discuss commercial spaceflights.

That first passenger service is slated to begin around 2008 under the name and logo of Virgin Galactic, a brainchild of Sir Richard Branson, Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen, and perhaps the ranking aeronautical genius of our age, Burt Rutan of Scaled Composites in Mojave, Calif. What lies beyond 2008, however, promises to be the beginning of a long but exciting pathway of companies and ideas leading to genuine public access to space.

Of course, we are a bit behind schedule.

The movie "2001: A Space Odyssey" set the most memorable benchmark. While public access wasn't the theme of the classic film, it depicted space liners routinely boosting passengers into near-Earth orbit to reach a huge and comfortable space station-hotel-spaceport shaped like a giant, slowly rotating wheel, and bearing little resemblance to our extremely limited current version that some have derisively dubbed a man-in-a-can.