Is price tag on space trips about to fall?

On Sept. 29, Anousheh Ansari, an American businesswoman born in Iran, touched down in Kazakhstan after orbiting aboard the International Space Station. The space tourist reportedly paid $20 million for the week-and-a-half trip.

As Ansari and a few predecessors proved, space travel is within reach of paying tourists — as long as they're multimillionaires. But will everyday people ever have access to space?

The answer is maybe for astronauts and probably for payloads.

"They'll have to bring down the cost of space transportation radically, before people that aren't millionaires and billionaires are able to travel," said J. David Baxter, president of the Salt Lake City-based Utah Space Association. Last Friday and Saturday in Ogden, the association hosted the National Space Society's Western regional conference, with topics including low-cost space transportation.

Advances in propulsion, some of which have been the subject of experiments, will be needed to bring down costs, he said.

"There's an expense problem with conventional rocketry," Baxter added. "It costs millions of dollars to do it."

However, he noted, Virgin Galactic has plans for "a $500,000 price tag for people to travel into space with them." If the venture, founded by space innovator Sir Richard Branson, is able to carry tourists into sub-orbital space for half a million dollars, the trip could be possible for upper-middle-class folks, he said.

"They'll be weightless, like Alan Shepard was, for 10 or 15 minutes, and then they'd come back down," Baxter said.

Baxter is optimistic that he'll be able to head into space someday, especially if new propulsion systems are developed. Many at last week's meeting were enthusiastic about it, he said.

Robert Bigelow, a staff member of Clark Planetarium at The Gateway and one of the speakers at the meeting, said he hopes someday the cost of human spaceflight drops. "I would like it to happen so I could do it," he said.

Although he's not an expert, he added, "I think we would need some better technology, more efficient propulsion engines."

Bigelow said if that ever happened, he imagines it would be "the ultimate vacation."

While not offering the ultimate vacation, UP Aerospace, based in Farmington, Conn., may be offering the ultimate school project.