When tourist space flight begins, I'll try it...

Of course it would be an amazing, unique, cool experience that you just have to do if you can, but would it be fun? Think about it. This isn't something you do for enjoyment. You do it for bragging rights, "experience points," a nice view, etc but otherwise it's something you endure. Space tourism would be more like mountain climbing than "tourism" as we normally think of that word.

If it gets cheap, of course there would be a lot of customers, but they'll get one-time customers. Once you have the bragg

Commercial space flight will almost assuredly never be available to most of us, especially considering the trajectory of our social stratification. With the current income inequality only getting worse, space flight will remain a pipe dream even for the upper middle class. It'll be a toy for the super rich until humanity collapses. Our sci-fi dreams of human society stretching out across the stars will be stopped dead by the laws of physics--and human greed.

I picked " as soon as it gets real cheap".

Some of the joys of being a late adopter:

1. You feel smug knowing that other people subsidized the development of your experience/product with THEIR money.

2. You get the enjoyment and support of a well established product or service.

3. You avoid the embarrassment of admitting something like "Yes.., I paid 5 thousand dollars for a computer running on a 386 Chip and Windows 3.0 "

4. You save gobs of money. Enough to have a nice dinner out after enjoying your new p

I'll sign up for space colonization. First in line, please.

.... for that is where I want my ashes to go, with some living schmuck into space and then have my ashed ejected into space. Not the urn, just the ashes. I'd like to become one with Space.

They always ruin everything. Once the flights begin, the tourists will probably be out there getting their photographs with the space penguins and messing with their nests.

Now if the flights got cheap enough to make it practical for a non-NASA scientist to just add it as a line item to a NSF funding proposal, I'd be all over going to space to do science as part of a support team. That's how I got to spend several summers freezing my butt off in the middle of the Greenland ice sheet.

Space couldn't be any col

They're gonna shoot you up at thousands of miles an hour.

You'll drop like a rock back down (freefall).

The vehicles skin will encounter elevated temperatures from the atmosphere (even at this suborbital hieght).

Forget about a parachute (won't help).

And you say you want it really CHEAP?!?!!?

LEO is not somewhere.

It's a fancy roller-coaster, with one spectacular view.

For now, it's not much better than a plane ride from New Zealand to Antarctica and back, although New Mexico's a little easier for a West Coaster who avoids TSA to reach than New Zealand.

Call me when I can emigrate off-planet.

Because you can bet your last buck that the TSA will be right there, ready to serve up an unconstitutional anal probe. I'll stick to travel modes in which my fourth amendment rights are respected.

Now, when those of us who feel that way are rounded up and given a mandatory 1-way trip on a colony ship, I'll go happily. For many reasons.

I'll try it when they find a cure for the form of motion sickness I get. Nausea? I wish. Instead what happens is that I feel a continuous sense of falling. Imagine being pelted with the worst fear you've ever felt continuously. Imagine the feeling of being startled, but with a continuous pump instead of a short burst. My palms have only gotten really sweaty once in my entire life--on a plane. I haven't flown since the early 90s because of this. I'm afraid I'll either black out or freak out up there,

The Kerbal space program [kerbalspaceprogram.com] while I wait.

I might consider moving there permanently, but not as a tourist. And permanence would require some reasonable place to live.

OTOH, when I was 19 I would have gone in a flash. Perhaps even if the trip was one way.

In the 1950s when I was in my preteens I put my name on a list at the Hayden Planetarium of people who were interested in booking a trip to the Moon as soon as it was commercially available. I wonder if they still have the list... and how much that might be worth as a mailing list when commercial flights become available.

They don't have my email address, though, since I didn't have one then. And my postal mailing address is a little out of date.

I think it'll probably get down to the $10,000 range in my lifetime, but I'll never do it. I can't think of anything less fun than vomiting in a metal can packed with a bunch of strangers. With that kind of money I can spend a week somewhere they put umbrellas in your drink.