Three months after US Transportation Secretary Slater became the first Cabinet-rank official to use the "T Word", the 10th report of the British government's Trade and Industry Committee also discussed space tourism and recommended:

On June 15, LunaCorp announced that Radioshack had become its first corporate sponsor. Lunacorp has been working for more than 10 years to put together a commercial lunar rover project, from which real-time 360-degree video would be transmitted back to viewers on Earth, and which would even allow selected guests to drive its rover from motion-simulators through two-way communications links.

In a little-reported speech to the US Space Foundation in Colorado Springs on April 4, US Transportation Secretary Rodney Slater, who is responsible for roads, shipping, railways, aviation and commercial space, made the following statements about space tourism:

MirCorp, the company formed by RSC Energia and a consortium of American businessmen, is set to take its first paying space tourist to the Mir Space Station, according to this BBC News article. MirCorp will be holding a live press conference about the mission on Monday, June 19, at their website at http://www.mirstation.com/.

As the "T Word" crops up more and more frequently in discussions of future space activities, senior figures in the space industry find themselves obliged to use the word and to acknowledge that tourism is going to become the biggest business in space. This often leads these people to venture guesses as to when space tourism may actually start. Interestingly, each date mentioned gets pushed farther into the future. In this way, taxpayers continue paying US$25 billion every year for current space activities, although these are clearly not leading towards the realisation of space tourism. These attempts to spread unrealistic projections to the public will presumably increase as the truth about tourism gets ever more coverage.

Energiya, a space technology company, and Gold & Appel, a holdings firm, recently established a joint venture, MirCorp, whose purpose is to commercialise the orbiting space station, Mir.

After many months of 'on-again, off-again' rumours that the MIR space station could be maintained in orbit as a private business facility if some tens of millions of dollars of new investment could be raised, it appears that this is about to happen.

With powered flight starting in 1903, aviation grew from zero to nearly $1 trillion/year by the end of the 20th century. So, starting in 2003 - and a sub-orbital space flight by private citizens will be the most appropriate achievement to commemorate the centenary of the Wright brothers' historic, first powered flight - we can expect to see space tourism services growing to a huge scale by 2100. Indeed, the potential for economic growth in the 21st century is much greater than that in the 20th, due to the accumulation of financial assets and to the growth and spread of financial markets world-wide. Consequently a new idea (such as mobile phones) can grow and spread through the entire world economy in just a few years. Thus passenger space travel could grow to reach a turnover of about $1 trillion/year by 2050 (by which time aviation will be several $trillion/year).

Space.com runs with an article titled, "Wanna Be A Space Tourist?" at:

In an article entitled "The Engineering of Dreams: The Future of Commercial Space" published in the National Space Society's magazine " Ad Astra" (September/October issue), Maxwell Hunter, one of the greats of rocket engineering, makes the case conclusively for launch vehicle development to focus on carrying passengers: