buran space bus?

This will work fine until the first accident, then the market may
disappear. Perceptions can change very quickly, think Enron and the
Berlin Wall.

On Wednesday, June 5, 2002, at 09:11 AM, panamabob wrote:

> defacto safety or perhaps the markets perception of safety is already
> shown
> by the purchase of ruskie space seats....
The International Space Station (ISS) most important legacy may be
jump-starting space tourism. Consider: the first space tourist, Dennis
Tito, was supposed to go to the Soviet era Mir space station. Under
pressure from NASA, Russia de-orbited the Mir which resulted in Mr. Tito
going to the ISS instead. Now the Mir was old, smelly, crowded and
probably not all that nice. The ISS was brand new, shinny, much more
roomy, etc. Mr. Tito came back to Earth with glowing accounts of how
great space is. Would his experience have been as good on Mir?

Al Globus
CSC at NASA Ames Research Center
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/~globus/home.html