The bad news:
1. You have to use public transportation
2. You have to stay in a government building
3. both the bus and the hotel were designed, and are operated, in cost-maximizing military-industrial complexes.

Not surprisingly the ticket price naturally reflects that fact.

Is it worth it for the staggering views, andfor that feeling of time standing still at the top of your trampoline bounce? Let's say it is.

Right now, if you had the money, you might get a slot.

You'd have to pass various tests, jump through various hoops, and now, you'd have to be willing to wait at least two years. But mainly, you'd have to do one thing: show them the money.

How much money? We hear figures like $20 million bandied about.

That seems to be at least the entire cost of the Russian mission you'd be on. You'd have to pay not just for your own seat but for the seats of two cosmonauts as well. (A Shuttle seat might not be any cheaper, since the U.S. manned-launch cost is more expensive per seat.)

So maybe it would be more like $8 million if the Russians could somehow fill more seats with paying customers.

However, that back-of-the-envelope calculation probably falls short. Maybe far short. NASA's initial opposition, aside from PR control issues ("What if Howard Stern signs up with the Russians? Can we say no?") may well have been based on calculations that, even at this ticket price, any then-hypothetical tourist would be the beneficiary of other subsidies.

And most of these subsidies would've already been charged to U.S. taxpayers, who might start asking: "When did we vote for *this*?" After all, nobody wants to be seen using anybody's tax money to pay for fun-rides for the rich.

The main cost sink is the tourist's destination -- the "hotel". With ISS, we're looking at sunk costs of around $30,000 per orbiting pound.

This is about 100 times that of an airliner, perhaps 1,000 times that of a nice cruise ship, and maybe 10,000 times the construction cost per delivered pound of a five-star hotel.

Tito and Shuttleworth could fly because, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein, "there's a there, there."

However, that "there" was, and is, extremely expensive in large part because extremely expensive construction methods were chosen, and for extremely political reasons.

An early comment by an astronaut about the potential for large ISS cost overruns is illuminating. He said ISS might cost a good bit more than people expect, because when you're out there tightening a bolt or adjusting a solar panel, the power tools can fail, you have to fall back on manual tools, and you can start to get very tired. Not that it's speedy work in any case.

These astronauts must reside in orbit during the period of their contribution. So the weight of a human being, plus the weight of their share of the collective life-support system (which has to run continuously even when they are sleeping) has to be lifted to orbit.

Let's say it's 500 pounds per astronaut. At $15,000 per pound of launch cost, and about the same in "value added per pound" terrestrially, you're looking at $15 million spent per construction worker per site visit, with an admittedly variable rate of output on each visit. This is probably an underestimate.

Which is to say: a major reason why building space stations is expensive is that final integration is done by astronauts, in space-suits. "Well, duh," you might respond. But let's look at it another way.

Why are space stations built by astronauts in the first place? Wouldn't it be dramatically cheaper to build them by remote control, that is, teleoperatively?

The cheapest current cost to LEO has been reckoned at around $1800/lb, around 1/8th of what it costs on the Shuttle.

It's a lot less reliable than the Shuttle, of course. If you're not risking a life, however, even a 20% launch failure rate shouldn't give you much pause -- you're paying for throughput, not safety. You'd stop worrying about addin quite so much value on the ground for each payload.

(Example: the recently launched P-1 Strut. Miles of wiring, densely packed with equipment. A terrestrial "value added" about on par with its launch cost. If this is a "structural member", then my head is "an appendage"!)

Any cost reduction from looser launch safety margins neglects a more dramatic one: because you don't have to ship a whole living human body plus its life support, you don't have to ship nearly the same mass to orbit for final integration tasks. A teleoperator can be any size, even (with current MEMS progress) insect-sized.

A teleoperator job can take far longer on the clock and still cost a lot less. Space construction workers on their lunch break could go down to the company cafeteria, or to Taco Bell, for a meal that costs less than 1% of the specially-formulated not-available-in-stores $500 semi-dehydrated packet of flavor-engineered astronaut nutrients.

These workers wouldn't have to be scheduled down to the minute, because, in this time-is-money equation, labor doesn't cost $200,000 a minute.

A teleoperated robot, especially an insect-sized one, might not get as much done per hour. But so what?

Say it takes 10 hours to teleoperatively tighten a bolt (visualize a whole chain-gang of space bugs) and that's 50 times longer than it takes a space-suited astronaut falling back on manual tools. You're still paying 1% of an astronaut-hour when all overhead is added in. So you're still winning.

You're winning, that is, if there's some point to reducing the costs. And therein lies the rub.

A big rub. It's this: as things stand, there is no point to reducing costs.

There's no point in cost-reduction because, right now, as always, manned space programs aren't businesses.

They are symbols of national prestige. This is a symbolism whose employment benefits you want to spread as evenly as possible, since it's fueled with money that was gathered as widely as possible, via taxation.

Spreading the symbolism thinner -- while it increases costs -- also makes it harder to kill a space project of any kind. It's a rare educated person who doesn't know somebody who knows somebody connected, somehow, at some point in their career, with a manned space program. That's a lot of people. More to the point, it's a lot of voters.

NASA doesn't need space tourism for validation.

Quite the contrary. In hosting a Lance Bass (who's next? Michael Jackson?!) it would invite ridicule that can only weaken its one selling point: national-prestige symbolism. But in limiting the guest list, NASA exposes itself to accusations of ideological slant.

For NASA, tourism is lose-lose, eventually if not sooner. Bouncers are only a matter of time -- after all, nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American people, and a lot of our more shrewd estimators have gotten very rich. What if Larry Flynt decides he wants some time in weightlessness, brief liberation from his wheelchair?

Some of these fine folk might be appearing at the ticket counter one of these years. And if you think there are some tasteless, unscrupulous richies in America, well, check out The New Russia.

Space tourism -- as an industry concept -- doesn't need ISS. Sure, ISS is convenient at the moment.

But some day, they'll have run through everybody who's willing to pay $20 million to go up, from among those they are willing to take. Tito and Shuttleworth could be plausible self-financed "mission specialists."

Haircut-band boys? I don't think so.

At that point, space tourism, the apparent 'killer app' for true commercialization of manned space travel, will be all dressed up with no place to go. No room at the hotel for the riff-raff. No seats at the back of the bus for the gauche nouveau-riche.

So I say: let's ban tourists from ISS. Sure, this will kill the currently-dependent space tourism companies (actually, the current *company* -- there's only one, really, and it's probably not going to survive the Columbia showstopper).

But it will keep the whole concept more viable for the future.

Are people going to suddenly *stop* being interested in going up? Why? Don't worry -- the market will still be there. It may be a longish lull, but eventually, somebody will talk to the engineers and do the numbers, and figure out what those of us in the hotel industry have known for a long time: you can tap a much larger market if you can keep your costs under control. Controlling costs? That's not NASA's job. It never will be.

Michael Turner got sick of the software industry after 20 years in it, and now manages reservations, promotion and marketing for a tiny hotel in Tokyo. He'd like to write more of the kind of diatribes that, like this one, can make you hit the ceiling. But right now he has to go fix ceilings that a few irate guests have -- despite Earth's gravity -- somehow hit.

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