I was told (by someone who should know) at the Return To The Moon Conference in Las Vegas in July, that Futron would soon be releasing their proprietary space tourism market research study (based on research by the Zogby polling organization), that they'd previously only been selling for twenty-five hundred bucks.

Well, the day before tomorrow's initial Ansari X-Prize attempt, they've done it. I'll try to read it in the next few days, and provide some thoughts.

[Via Clark Lindsey, who does a much better job that I possibly could in keeping up with this kind of thing]

Rand,

You ought to mention this on sci.space.policy if you haven't yet. There's at least a statistical chance that some of the guys like Dave O' Neil and others who were poo-pooing you over space tourism might be honest enough to change their minds once they have a chance to read this survey over. It's a long shot, but it'd at least put some more data on the table.

~Jon

Way ahead of you, Jon. In fact, I posted there first. ;-)

"Statistical chance"... heh! That'll be the day!

On my first skim through the report, it looks pretty good, although I think they're being pessimistic about the orbital side of things. The price-demand curve looks about right, but I suspect that ticket cost will be well below $5 million by 2021.

Look forward to hearing your thoughts on it!

I've had a first skim through, I'll print it to read properly and make notes on it.

Generally - it's a market survey, similar to the ones I've used in the past to draw up telecoms business plans, my views on the validity of such documents are on the record.

It looks glossy, well researched and detailed. I've seen some of what I would describe as "fudges" in their data sets on the first cursory glance which might just be me, but they appear to have "concatenated" certain data sets to give the report higher impact.

Also it seems, again on first glance, to be missing some important caveats about the abilities of individuals to assess personal risk which are obvious from the tables of "perceived" risk - which raises concerns about the ability of this market to deal with vehicle loss.

I'll blog a more reasoned response in a day or two on Atomicrazor.

Generally; my concerns about space tourism still stand and I've not seen too much here to remove my skeptics hat.

However, the Americas Space Prize looks interesting and I will say that at the very least the salt and pepper are standing by for me to eat that hat with.

Speaking of.... I understand the "offical" announcement for the American Space Prize is supposed to be next week... I wonder if he'll take the oportunity to do it during the 2nd X-prize flight?

Also concerning the ASP, I think the REAL prize is going to be the chance at an exclusive contract for delivery to the Bigelow space station.

Randy