"Hop David" wrote in message
...
Suppose a space tourism market does come to pass: Rich folk ride the
descendants of an X-prize winner to enjoy the view and weightlessness.
The flights would be suborbital or low earth orbit, no?

Would this make Mars, the moon, or even high earth orbit more accessible?

Hop
http://clowder.net/hop/index.html

My plan is to skip low Earth orbit altogether and go straight to the moon.
Setting up a tourist business on the moon is more difficult than setting up
a tourist business in low Earth orbit, but on the moon, you can work on
multiple goals simultaneously. The missing link in space is mining and
manufacturing. Just making bricks in space would be an improvement over
what we have now.

Once you learn how to build buildings on the moon using local resources,
then you can build fairly nice hotels there. Tourists will have to spend
more, but they'll get a nicer place to visit. If there was a huge demand
for low Earth orbit, then a tourist business there would be useful, but I'm
dubious about the demand being there.

Once we have construction machines working on the moon, we can ship similar
machines to Mars and start building houses there.