by Dr. Patrick Collins

By Patrick Collins

Now that the previously suppressed Nasa report "General Public Space Travel and Tourism" is available on the Nasa web site, it bears looking at. Go to www.nasa.gov and type the words 'space tourism' into the search box. You may get more than you were expecting.

The very positive report on the feasibility of space tourism published by Nasa in March 1998 is now available via Nasa's web-site. Typing 'space tourism' into the search form brings it up as the 3rd reference, dated 25 July, 2001. This follows three and a half years during which Nasa administrator Goldin prevented it being publicly accessible.

The classic article "Studies Claim Space Tourism Feasible" published in 'Aviation Week & Space Technology' the leading aerospace industry magazine on April 7, 1997, pp 58-60, is now available on the Internet here. The 3-page article, by Aviation Week reporter William Scott, described 3 presentations at the 1997 IEEE Aerospace Conference held in Snowmass, Colorado, and is of considerable historic interest in being the first article about space tourism to be published in Aviation Week (though not the first time that the words have been used).

NASA Watch, the website that is famously "on NASA's case" has opened a new section on "Tourism and other non-traditional uses of space". Although still under construction as of this writing, expect to see this grow in the coming months.