This year, the only star tours of any stripe are happening across the pond, where on October 15^th, the Russians are sending up a complement of cosmonauts and astronauts to relieve the crew of the International Space Station. Since the Space Shuttle program ended, Russia charges NASA $43 million per seat to send American personnel up in Soyuz, and my guess is that you’d have to at least match that if you simply can’t wait another year to eat astronaut ice cream in the mesosphere.

There is, however, a much more affordable consolation prize. In the week leading up to the Soyuz launch, a private firm named the MIR corporation (no relationship to the space station) is hosting a “near-space experience” in Russia. True, you won’t get the photo opportunities that Branson’s trip promises, but for your $13,995, with an additional $1395 if you’re traveling alone and don’t take a roommate, your ten days in Russia will give you an experience that’s quite a bit longer, with a training program that’s perhaps at least as intense.

The first full day of the trip includes a visit to the Yuri Gargarin Cosmonaut Training center in the once-classified Star City, where anyone who wants to experience the optional cosmonaut training activities will undergo a thorough physical exam. I can only guess what this might entail, but I don’t see why you’d come this far and not want to do what this allows. You’d experience up to 4 Gs on the world’s largest centrifuge, and get a ride on a parabolic zero-G simulation flight, experiencing zero gravity for at least as long as a ride on Virgin Galactic can offer you, for less than a tenth the price.

You’ll also get to wear an Orlan space suit, the extremely heavy (models weigh up to 265 lbs.) and semi-rigid getup worn on spacewalks. While wearing the suit, participants will also be trained to do the sort of tasks that cosmonauts have to do when floating in space outside of the station, while suspended from a boom to simulate the zero gravity conditions. My guess is that it’s all somewhat harder than it looks.

Led by American Dr. Steven Lee, a Cornell-educated planetary geologist who is now a department chair at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, the rest of the trip is a cavalcade of all things Russian and extra-planetary. At the moment, the other non-travel days include museum & historical tours, lectures, confabs with actual former and future ISS crew, a visit to Mission Control, and a VIP seat to the Soyuz launch. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner are included every non-travel day, but there are no menus or specifics, which, depending on your taste, may not be a plus if you’ve been to Russia. Then again, seledka pod shuboy might be a real experience at zero gravity, and if you’re a vegetarian trying to get by on svejie ovoshy alone, MIR seems willing to help arrange culinary (or any other kind of legal) expeditions pre- or post-itinerary, if you so desire.

Americans who still can’t/shouldn’t/won’t shell out $14k for 10 days among space junkies in Russia can be patient. Extant programs like Adult Space Academy at Space Camp in Alabama already offer a vastly simplified version of astronaut life for $549 apiece, and it’s possible that someday Branson will open his more intense multi-day training program for people who just want the terrestrial experiences. For now, though, MIR’s program looks like the one to beat in 2012 for real space-related activities in the context of an actual mission. Since the Russians put Dennis Tito in Soyuz TM-32 for $20 million back in 2001, they’ve had the edge in the space tourism race, and least for this year, that’s not going to change – no matter what Ashton Kutcher can buy.

Right now, a ticket will cost you $200,000, with a minimum deposit of $20k, but a larger deposit (or an outright purchase) will allow you to skip ahead a bit in line past over 400 other depositors, and join Katy Perry, Russell Brand, Pharrell Williams, and Dallas Austin near the front of the line, when flights depart in 2013.

Now, you can hold out hope that the price will go down within a few years; if 200k seems like a little much, even for an airplane ride a couple dozen miles closer to Betelgeuse, bear in mind that any form of passenger air travel, when novel, has been ludicrously expensive. Remember this: when Sinatra, in a classic wealth-as-seduction move, implored all women to “Come Fly With Me” in 1957, he was laying the foundation for 50 Cent, not choosing between peanuts or pretzels. That year, the very concept of “economy class” was brand-spanking-new, and in any case, certainly not where the air is, or was, rarefied.

While passenger flights are now cluttered with crying toddlers, SkyMall magazines, and Jodi Picoult novels, the new strata of stratospheric travel perversely mirrors just how much wider the income gap has become since 1957, and how much farther out of sight a little Sinatra-level coin will buy you. So what, besides delirious exclusivity and Hipstamatic prints of the Kármán Line, does the modern person of wealth and taste get for their two hundred grand?

Not a hell of a lot. For the main event, you’ll join two pilot/astronauts and five other passengers on the VSS Enterprise for a three-and-a-half hour trip, “a fraction” of which will actually be spent in sub-orbital space, with just around six minutes of weightlessness. Seems like a steep cost for such a brief time up there, but if it’s a success, longer trips, full orbits, and possibly even a moon landing will be on the program before long, and maybe the frequent-flier miles will count for something.

It is, however, all part of a larger experience. Once purchased directly from Virgin Galactic or an “accredited space agent,” the price of your ticket includes, importantly, “three days of pre-flight preparation, bonding and training onsite at the [Spaceport America] spaceport.” The LEED Gold-certified commercial facility, from which UP Aerospace, Lockheed Martin and Armadillo Aerospace will also operate space flights, is nearing completion in the desert outside of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico (where, not coincidentally, Branson is constructing a luxury hotel).

For prospective space tourists, Branson’s program looks to be a little more inclusive than NASA; he suggests that almost anyone who can front the cash can come aboard. The Virgin Galactic website states “the vast majority of people who want to fly will not be prevented from doing so by health or fitness considerations.”

Still, if you can’t or won’t spring for the 200k, there’s always other ways to float weightless for six minutes, and even if you positively must do it via Virgin Galactic, there are options. You can join the band Muse, who are planning on cajoling a free trip out of Branson in order to be the first band to record a song in space, or you can secure employment among Branson’s expanding Virgin Galactic workforce, or you could attempt to be a future replacement for any of the pilot/astronauts he’s recently hired, provided you have a minimum of 3,000 hours flying “large multi-engine aircraft and high performance fast jet aircraft and low lift-to-drag ratio glide experience.” If you’re still a bit short in such qualifications, the National Test Pilot School in nearby California does offer a course, but tuition is a keep-the-riffraff-out $918,000 – enough for seats on the VSS Enterprise for you and three homeboys, so why bother.

In spite of the cost, and perhaps a limited bang for one’s buck, if you’re an “outer space” fanatic and if money’s no object, it’ll be like no six minutes you’ve ever experienced before, as Katy Perry’s testimony, reported in a constellation of sites online, demonstrates. “Russell and I are interested in anything extraterrestrial,” she says. “I just thought, ‘What else can I give this man?’ He’s had every experience in the world, but not a trip to space.”

Better get up there while it’s still rarefied.

None of this will likely ever exist on Mars. They say there’s plenty of carbon dioxide for plants to breathe, and sure, but the alkaline soil is full of rust and the mean temperature is -63° C. There’s also no ozone layer, so even in the places where it’s sometimes warmer, the ground is completely irradiated through about the first 15 centimeters. You’d have better luck terraforming Chernobyl if it was in Antarctica; at least you’d have some oxygen, which is kicked to the curb by Mars’ thin atmosphere and scant atmospheric pressure (which, along with the temperatures, disallows liquid water on the surface). The planet’s small magnetic field is also completely out of whack, so compasses as we know them won’t work. All this is to say that on Mars, you will be lost, irradiated, asphyxiating, and freezing to death, all at once, and then the largest dust storms in the Solar System will wipe out whatever’s left of you.

Making Mars even one-tenth as livable as the North Pole or the Sahara Desert will be such an expensive, lengthy, and delicate undertaking that the astronauts who attempt it may never return home to Earth. Therefore, this seems to be the plan.

Because of the tremendous expense of transporting a human crew to  and from Mars, the most recent NASA project has scrapped the return voyage. Even sending an unmanned vessel into space costs about $12,000 a pound, most of which is spent in the first few hundred miles, and given the countless tons of supplies will be needed to convey, safely land, and indefinitely sustain a human being on Mars, NASA already figures it’s cheaper to send them more stuff through space than figure out how to get them back.

George W. Bush and Barack Obama are both huge fans of Mars, and even with a Congress full of small-government types rooting out what they consider to be wasteful spending, this program will likely proceed through private funding even if its limited government support goes kaput.

The Hundred-Year Starship project headed by NASA Ames Research Center director Pete Worden is currently trying to drum up $10 billion to send a person to Mars and leave them there. Google’s Larry Page is a potential investor; a few more like him and you’ll see this solo Mars mission go down in the next twenty-odd years.
Using nuclear power, they already figure they can get a person to Mars in about four months. To be fair, this is no longer space tourism; it’s colonization, and the person might be lucky enough to be joined by other colonists over time if they can stay alive and prove it’s worth the trouble. Otherwise, with their achievement still evolving into legend, the first person on Mars will have the loneliest death in the universe, amidst a frigid hell of rust-colored fire.

Next time you pass by an elementary school, be extra careful; the person who’s going to do this first is probably already alive today and is right now between five and ten years old. Stop for the dreamy little kid in the crosswalk, walking apart from the rest. Watch as they cross, head up, eyes aimed past the birds and trees, staring into the sky that will never bring them home.