21st Century Luxury: Space Tourism

This week Virgin Galactic opened its spacecraft to BBC. See the full story with a video unveiling the crafts here. Tickets will start at $150,000 a trip, limiting it to a select group of initial travelers. This will likely become a 21st century luxury, a form of extravagant but wasteful expenditure, for the experience alone, instead of actually going from one destination to another like conventional travel. But the extravagance of space travel may also generate new types of space tourism fashion and media coverage, creating a larger public interest.