The first symposium on Personal Access to Space held by the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) in Arcachon, France, May 28-30, 2008, was a mixture of both the encouraging and the discouraging.

By Alan Breakstone

For the first time in Nasa’s more than 40-year history, Nasa funds have been used to ask US citizens whether they would like to take a trip to space - and the results strongly endorse Space Future's position.

SpaceProjects.com's Rich Robins has written a report of the recent FAA conference on space transportation, with a special focus on Patrick Collins and issues close to Space Future's heart:

Eight excellent papers concerning various aspects of space tourism were presented to an audience of about 100 people in the session "Space Tourism and other Novel Space Applications" held on October 7th at the 50th IAF Congress in Amsterdam. (There were no other topics.)

Over 100 people from around the world gathered at the Space Transportation Association's "Going Public" Space Tourism conference in Washington, D.C. to learn more about the issues inhibiting space tourism from becoming a viable endeavor.