Space travel for fun and profit: the private space industry soars higher by lowering its sights.

• Author: Mangu-Ward, Katherine

BARBED WIRE SURROUNDED the Bigelow Aerospace compound, set in a stretch of dry, rock-strewn Nevada desert. Las Vegas glittered in the distance, but otherwise the vista had the desolate look of a lunar landscape, with one difference: The summer heat was oppressive--enough to make you long for the cool vacuum of outer space.

The van full of visiting space geeks didn't mind the harsh conditions. Last July they happily left the air-conditioned glamour of Vegas' Flamingo Hotel and Casino, where the cream of the private space industry had gathered for the NewSpace 2006 conference, to spend a few hours at Bigelow's warehouse and mission control center. They couldn't have been more excited if the van had been on its way to a Star Trek-themed strip club.

Earlier in the week, Bigelow Aerospace had successfully launched Genesis I into orbit. A small pod that inflates once aloft, Genesis I is a prototype for cheap, livable, interconnecting rooms for commercial use in space. The first in a series of launches scheduled every six months for the next two and a half years, it marked the beginning of what could be the first privately funded space station.

Robert Bigelow, president and CEO of the company, made his fortune with the hotel chain Budget Suites of America and other real estate ventures. He has a logical goal in mind: an orbital hotel. Similar in concept to the International Space Station but much larger, Bigelow's space-habitat project uses a cast-off National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) system of inflatable pods. He bought the rights to the technology in 200l, when he read that NASA was scrapping the promising system after many years and many more millions of dollars of development. Bigelow, 62, has since sunk $75 million into the project, with a promise of $425 million more to come.

Stepping inside Bigelow Aerospace's cool, antiseptic, heavily guarded warehouse was like walking into a science fiction novel. Enormous models and pieces of space-bound machinery were strewn about like forgotten Lego blocks over tens of thousands of square feet. The delegation from the NewSpace conference shuffled along with the quiet awe usually reserved for holy places. At one point, a member of Bigelow's mission control team looked at his watch and said, "Actually, Genesis should be passing overhead right now." Everyone in the room looked up, instinctively, as though the module would be visible. Then they grinned sheepishly at each other.

The grins reflected something more than embarrassment at having fallen for an old gag. ("Hey look," someone cracked, "gullible is written on the ceiling.") The visitors were just plain happy. After years of hope and speculation, the private-sector space enthusiasts were thrilled to hear the words "It's overhead right now" from one of their own.

The Genesis launch, while exciting, is peanuts compared to what's coming in the next two years. Besides the ever-larger Bigelow launches, scads of private suborbital space vehicles will be popping up all over the planet and breaking out of Earth's atmosphere, about 62 miles above sea level.

Bigelow and his ilk are part of an industry that calls itself NewSpace, though some prefer the techy alt.space and others favor the touchy-feely personal space. Since the late '90s, they've been coalescing into clubs, nonprofits, and other associations. In the bad old days, this crowd got together mostly to bitch about NASA and its evil stepchildren, Lockheed and Boeing. But while NASA remains a topic of interest, NewSpacers have passed out of their whiny adolescent phase and into industrious young adulthood. Their aspirations are appropriately modest--mostly suborbital, just a quick trip to the edge of the atmosphere. They're setting aside deep space exploration and the moon for now (though they talk a big game about what's next), opting instead for reasonable, practical, short-term goals: quick hops for tourists and other near-to-Earth fun. And instead of crying on each other's shoulders, suddenly the NewSpacers are seeing each other--and sometimes NASA--as the competition.

Thanks in part to a preponderance of tech millionaires, the NewSpace industry is picking up speed. As Bigelow has noted, "We are probably a very close cousin to the world of the Internet and the computer world--doubling every 18 months."

In addition to big-name companies like Virgin Galactic, dozens of smaller entrepreneurial ventures wait in the wings, including Armadillo Aerospace, the rocket company started by Doom and Quake programmer John Carmack. So do communications equipment manufacturers, spacesuit designers, and many other enterprises, releasing pent-up innovation and creativity as NASA's long-lived monopoly on space, or at least suborbital space, wheezes to an end.

The industry, dominated just a few years ago by a bunch of seemingly loony space cadets with big dreams, is becoming the province of respectable, hardheaded CEOs. What happened?

Three-Hour Tours

The biggest name in the NewSpace business is the British billionaire Richard Branson. The pop entrepreneur founded the space tourism company Virgin Galactic in 2004, and he plans to be flying missions by 2008. Apparently taking a page from Gilligan's Island, Virgin will carry paying passengers on three-hour tours, complete with seven minutes of zero gravity, after just a week of preflight training. The Virgin spacecraft will be modeled on SpaceShipOne, the vehicle dreamed up by the aviation legend Burt Rutan. Rutan's spacecraft captured the privately funded Ansari X Prize in 2004 by being the first private manned ship to exit the atmosphere twice in a span of two weeks. After taking the $10 million prize, Rutan's company, Scaled Composites, signed with Branson to build the bigger, better SpaceShipTwo. Rutan says the new ship will fly higher than the first model and carry eight people.

Branson has generated headlines for the private spaceflight industry (and himself) by accepting several $200,000 down payments for early flights. Potential tourist-astronauts include Moby...