Alan Boyle has a good rundown on upcoming attractions at Epcot and Universal. Disney is shooting for a space experience that may do a fair job of simulating almost a minute of weightlessness.

I don’t think that this will detract from the market for true weightlessness, such as Zero G Corp will offer, because you’ll be able to actually move around and do weightless stuff in the airplane. It’s really a different market. (By the way, despite the hype on their web page, they won’t be the first private provider of weightlessness in the US–as far as I know, the late Lee Weaver and I were, but they may be the first financially successful one.)

Alan asks a question at the end:

In the wake of Columbia?s loss, ?Mission: Space? may well be as close as paying customers will get to space flight for the foreseeable future. What do you think?

I think that Columbia is utterly irrelevant to how soon we get paying customers into space. The folks working X-Prize, and those developing suborbitable passenger vehicles, such as Jeff Bezos, don’t seem to be deterred, and in fact, NASA is in such disarray right now that it will probably actually encourage a lot of the entrepreneurs, because it’s too busy with its own problems to get in the way. Getting rid of Art Stephenson was a good step toward making NASA less of a problem.