Someone over there has been noticing the new space industry:

New commercial markets, among them space tourism, have a great potential to become major drivers in space technology development. This study aims at the assessment of the feasibility of European initiatives to address these new markets through the development of crewed space vehicles.

The more the merrier, but given Airbus’ problems and the general bureaucratic issues over there (even worse than NASA, if that can be believed), I’m not as encouraged as some might be. In addition, they’ve even more of a nanny-state mentality than we do here, and they’ll have trouble getting the kind of flexible regulatory environment with regard to passenger safety that we just won from the FAA. Not to mention the fact that they don’t have any natural flight test sites there–they’ll have to go to Africa, Asia or the Middle East to find sufficiently large unpopulated areas.