On June 21, Mike Melvill became the first private citizen to pilot a craft into outer space. His SpaceShipOne vessel rocketed to 62.5 miles above the Mojave Desert, and for a few glorious minutes, Melvill felt the ethereal effects of weightlessness, witnessed the infinite opaque blackness of the cosmos and looked down upon the earth and saw not only the Mojave Desert from which he came, but San Diego, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and halfway to San Francisco.

Other than the Paul (Microsoft) Allen-backed SpaceShipOne endeavor, there are currently about 50 international aerospace companies striving to make space tourism a viable business model within the next few years (the FAA already has a full-time department devoted to regulating public use of outer space). It remains to be seen who will pioneer this field first, but one thing is certain: Someone is going to do it, and they’re going to do it very soon.

The travel agency Space Adventures ( www.spaceadventures.com) has already received more than 100 reservations for sub-orbital space flights that they claim will begin launching in 2006, even though they have yet to determine what kind of spacecraft will be used for such flights. Current price tag: $98,000.

“I think the speculative price being charged by Space Adventures is probably a good starting point and maybe a business can be made by flying two people at a time at $100,000 apiece,” says Jim Benson, CEO of SpaceDev, the company that built SpaceShipOne’s revolutionary engine, which uses a combination of rubber and laughing gas (seriously) as fuel; it’s the world’s first non-exploding rocket propulsion system. “But I think that cost can be brought down to about $10,000, or $15,000 per person [within five years].”

Benson believes the first-generation space tourism model will be a vertical take-off craft that will travel 100 miles above the earth’s surface, be in space for three to six minutes, then re-enter the atmosphere and conclude its trip by gliding into a horizontal, or runway-type, landing. SpaceShipOne, by comparison, was launched from the bottm of another aircraft at high altitude.

Although some companies are trying to find ways to design a horizontal take-off and landing spacecraft, Benson believes it’s not only a waste of energy, but it reduces the allure of space travel. “When people think about being launched into space, they expect to be strapped down on their back, facing straight up and that they’re going to hear a countdown – five, four, three, two, one – and then they’re going to feel a tremendous rumble and the G’s are going to mount and they’re going to go straight up.”

If the vertical take-off and horizontal landing model proves successful, the entire trip would only take about 20 minutes… but what a 20 minutes they will be. After the intense take-off, and once the craft has escaped the earth’s atmosphere, passengers will “probably have five or six minutes to float around in their seat. You might have eyedroppers to squirt water, so you can see beads of water stream across the cabin.”

And what about the view? “You’d be able to see a hemisphere of the earth, depending on how high you go,” says Peter Wainwright, founder of Space Future (www.spacefuture.com ), a space consulting firm. “Another reason to go to space is that you can see the stars properly. On earth, we have an atmosphere that gets in the way and [stars] are all just white from the ground and you tend to forget they really are multi-colored. You go to space and you’ll see yellow, red, even blue stars.”

Finally, there’s the re-entry stage: one moment, you’re listening to the sound of your own heartbeat amidst the omniscient silence of outer space; the next, you begin to hear the scream of your craft cutting through the atmosphere’s uppermost air molecules. Then comes the rush of five Gs, which flattens you to your seat for a few seconds (think: an elongated moment of deceleration at the bottom of a drop on a rollercoaster). The journey concludes with a few minutes of gentle gliding until you reach the runway.

While a thousand dollars per minute may seem like a vacation only a few people could pay to experience, numerous studies conclude otherwise. “If we can get the cost down to less than $25,000 and you can get a five or six minute [outer space] experience, there will be an enormous market,” claims Benson. “There have been several credible surveys that show this is potentially a billion dollar market.”

“At the price point of $20,000, there are estimations that at least five million people in the U.S. are ready to do this,” says Wainwright. “It’s easy to be blasé about [looking at the earth from space] because we’re so used to seeing satellite photos of it, but apparently the effect of seeing the earth from space can be so profound that it actually has a psychological term called ‘the overview effect.’ If you talk to a lot of astronauts, they will tell you that they became environmentalists after traveling to space. You can actually see the damage to the rain forest from space, should you care to look in that direction. You can’t underestimate the impact of really putting this in front of someone’s face.”

Benson also acknowledges the irony of realizing the earth’s significance from the perspective of outer space. “We only have one space ship (i.e. earth) and it only has one life support system and when you’re up there looking down on it, apparently it looks pretty damn small and fragile. We are dismantling our space ship earth life support system as the population grows, and it’s worrisome – so maybe the more people that get to space, the more recognition there will be of the fragility of this planet and a greater appreciation for taking care of what we have. Maybe even making it better.”