Space Tourism the New Space Race?

Fifty years after the Soviet Union beat the United States to send the first human to space, a new space race is heating up. This time, the players are not nations — rather, they're commercial companies that aim to send the first paying passengers to space on private spaceships. "It's an exciting time for the industry," said George Whitesides, president of suborbital spaceship company Virgin Galactic. 

Virgin Galactic is not alone. A handful of other companies are also racing to build suborbital vehicles to meet the perceived demand from tourists, as well as scientists who'd like to conduct short experiments in microgravity.

The secretive Blue Origins company, bankrolled by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, is developing the suborbital Goddard vehicle under the firm's New Shepard program. 

Armadillo Aerospace, a Texas-based company founded by computer game entrepreneur John Carmack, is another contender with a vertically launched rocket ship in development.

Masten Space Systems, and XCOR Aerospace, both of Mojave, Calif., are also building suborbital spaceships called Xaero and Lynx, respectively. 

However, even when suborbital passenger flights do begin to take off, they won't come cheap.
Tickets on SpaceShipTwo are priced at $200,000 per seat to start, which doesn't exactly make such trips accessible to everyday folks. Nonetheless, more than 380 customers have already put down deposits for their flights, with many more on the waiting list. 

At $102,000 a pop, Armadillo Aerospace's flights will be a relative bargain. And as more suborbital flights take place in the future, the prices for all of them will come down, officials from numerous companies have said. Space.com