On October 27 the British government published its reply to the recent tenth Report of its Select Committee on Trade and Industry which had recommended an independent review of launch vehicle investment policy, including the issue of passenger travel. This was the first time that any country's space policy has been challenged on this issue at such a high politicial level - and the Blair government's response illustrates well the bitter resistance of the existing 'space industry' to long-overdue change - because it totally ignores the central economic issue raised by the Select Committee!

Well, it happens to everyone eventually.

NASA has recently admitted that the X-34 project, touted with the X-33 as the route to reducing launch costs, is at an impasse. Readers will remember that in 1995, as a result of the great success of the DC-X reusable rocket funded by the Defence Department, NASA announced its own RLV program - with the X-33 and X-34 reusable rockets as its centre-pieces. Both were to start a series of progressive demonstration flights in 1999, leading on to low-cost launch vehicles.

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:

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.

It is now more than 6 months since Mr Goldin promised in front of a plenary session of the 1999 Space Frontier Foundation Conference to put NASA's space tourism report on NASA's web-site. But he has still not done so.

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.

A surprising number of "special reports" on the 21st century published in newspapers and magazines fail even to mention the possibility of space tourism - which shows just how blind they are. That's because the growth of space tourism is going to be a "core change" in human society through the 21st century, as the spread of air travel world-wide was a core change of 20th century society. (It would be an interesting project for a student (perhaps studying the history of technology?) to survey and record how inaccurate these turn-of-the-century articles were.)