The piece about space tourism on ATC that Instantman mentioned earlier is available on the web.

It was a pleasant surprise. They had some good quotes from Jeff Greason, the President of XCOR. They also mentioned the Space Access meeting in Phoenix this past weekend, a report on which I’ve still to write up. The only down note came from (I’m shocked, shocked) a NASA employee.

Roughly paraphrasing: “Space is just so hard, and so expensive, and so dangerous. Maybe someday, everyday people will be able to go, but that day’s a long way off, and in the meantime, we’ll take care of things for you, by sending a few of our elite astronauts up there for no obvious purpose, at a cost of billions of dollars per year, which you can enjoy vicariously, kinda like going down to the video store and renting sex flicks. After all, if just anyone could go, and it didn’t cost all that much, how would we justify our continuing existence?”