Gregg Easterbrook has a reasonably good history of private space launch activities in the most recent Atlantic Monthly, and it’s worth reading for someone unfamiliar with the field, though it’s not without its flaws. He seems to be inordinately enraptured with Sea Launch, and he almost ignores the tourism market. In fact, this makes the piece a little disjointed:

…history’s first space tourists, two rich men who bought rides on old Soviet rockets launched from Kazakhstan in 2001 and 2002, paid about $20 million each to be crammed into a tiny capsule and subjected to agonizing G-forces at blast-off, to eat freeze-dried food and bump into floating Russians in orbit, and, finally, to come home motion sick. There’s a limit to that market.

Immediately following this, he then backtracks slightly:

Yet in the early days of aviation, airplanes were absurdly expensive and impractical too. Budget-busting government programs dominated, and flight applications were too specialized for the typical person to care about. In 1935, when Pan Am’s first Clipper took off to chase the sun across the Pacific, air travel seemed destined always to be an experience exclusively for the super-rich; in 2001 U.S. airlines alone carried 622 million passengers, including tens of millions of the working class, and even the poor. When Federal Express proposed in 1973 to move packages anywhere overnight, the idea seemed a costly extravagance best suited to big business; now average Americans routinely get shirts or CDs delivered overnight. And in 1910, when crowds gathered throughout the United States to watch the touring Bl