A very helpful thing to do is to contact travel companies, airlines and hotel companies, tell them that you'd like to travel to space, and ask whether, when and at what price they will provide the service. If they're incredulous, tell them about Space Future!

Companies respond to what their customers want and so the more often this happens, the more such companies will start to take steps like making booking lists for when the service begins, contacting airlines and manufacturers to ask when they're planning to offer the service, contacting local politicans, and so on.

You can also contact travel companies which already have such lists - like Space Tours GmbH in Bremen, Germany, which is making a list of bookings for staying in an orbital hotel (email Hartmut Mueller or Fax to: 49 4242 3891). And if you have a mind for it, you can try to get movement through the political system.

As you will have seen, an encouraging amount of work has already been done on how to realize space tourism and power from space. But also clearly a lot of work still remains to be done, on many different aspects of these projects - from engineering to interior design, from orbital mechanics to marketing, from fashion to law. There's work to be done in almost every academic field.

What is particularly fun is that at the present early stage it's still possible to make a valuable contribution without having major resources, because so little work has been done in these fields so far. "It's like developing a new, vast and wonderful frontier" as an architect said of designing a space hotel.

So for example, students, whether undergraduates, post-graduates or doctoral students, can make valuable contributions by selecting a topic, working on it, and writing a report on it.

So for anyone who is interested - researchers, research supervisors or students - we can offer advice on worthwhile topics, approaches, resources and contacts. We've already done a lot of the initial work for you by building the Space Future archive.

And we can help students who'd like to do a project in this area, but have to persuade your supervisors. You've probably already learned that many supervisors are very shy about working on such "unconventional" or "non-traditional" subjects. If you've got this far in Space Future, you probably already understand that this is the future. But for many many people (including university teachers) these ideas are still somehow difficult to accept. So you need to provide your supervisor with a clear, matter-of-fact case that these are now topics receiving growing attention world-wide (see the Space Future Journal for most recent progress) and entirely reasonable for research.

We can provide help with this, advising on topics, and commenting on your proposals (time permitting). But in exchange you must give us a copy of your report, which we'll add to the archive.