One of the biggest concerns about going out beyond lower Earth orbit is the radiation. We find that exercise seems to counteract a lot of the negative effects of space flight, like bone loss and muscle atrophy and cardiovascular systems issues. We exercise two hours a day on the station, which is a huge hit out of your day. It's great for staying in shape, but you know, it cuts into the productivity of the crew and if you look at how expensive it is to get a crew into space, if we can keep them healthy and have them exercise, but spend less time doing it, we can get more done.

If you think about the energy that a rocket engine has to put out and all the fuel and you're sitting on top of like a bomb. And on the Space Shuttle, that big orange tank is filled with liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, the white cell rocket boosters on the sides are filled with solid propellant. There's a lot of energy in all those chemicals there and you've got to control it in a way so it doesn't explode. So, there's a lot of plumbing, a lot of valving, a lot of control systems, and it's a very complicated thing. So, how do you bring the price of that down?

Richard Branson is probably the most visible of the private commercial space guys, and what is venture, Virgin Galactic is about is sub orbital flight. That is, you'll see a spacecraft that looks more or less like an airplane and it will fly into space, but only spend about 15 minutes. It'll go up in a parabolic arc and then fall back down, and so the customers on that flight will only get about five minutes of weightlessness. They'll get to glimpse the horizon of the Earth, take a look at it before just before they start coming back down into the atmosphere.

The United States, Russia, and China are the only three countries in the world that can launch astronauts into space. Mostly in the U.S. you see some companies trying to launch private commercial people into space, but nobody's done it yet. The only private vehicle that's made it into space so far is Spaceship 1 in 2004, and that was an effort that was funded by one of the Microsoft founders, and he spent about $20 million to develop this spacecraft to do a sub-orbital flight. And it's not the same as going into orbit, but it was a huge first step.

The current market cost for a space flight, about a week in space and about six people have gone with the Russians so far to the International Space Station; it costs about $30 to $35 million. So, it's not for the faint of heart. But our own market studies that we've commissioned as well as some public market studies all indicate that there are somewhere around 20 or so individuals every year who have both the means and the interest to do this. So, the market is definitely out there.

We have self-assessment tools, computer-based tools to see how we are performing mentally in outer space and there's some also very interesting technology and work that's being funded by NRSBI to look at facial recognition to look at your patterns to see if you're experiencing stress or fatigue. It's a kind of thing that I think will gain acceptance with gradually. But it probably has more to immediate application in things like homeland security, and looking at facial recognition of people going through airports and things like that to see who's under stress.

Because we didn't cooperate with China, we gave them motivation to develop their own capability. You know, they developed a very capable rocket system, very capable spacecraft. And if we don't cooperate with them in the future, they're going to develop more capable systems. If we're working together on a highly visible project, there is going to be much less, or there is going to be motivation for each country to not get into a conflict or any kind of tension in the military sense.