It brings a tear to my eye. Today we stand one step closer to my ultimate dream: to emigrate to outer space. Dennis Tito, rich guy, is also Dennis Tito, smart and lucky guy. He gets to take the ultimate vacation and I just hope he blazes a heavy trail to the heavens!

  Not that there in anything much to see out there, except a few more stars, and a telescope brings you even closer to them than a rocket can. So maybe it is the weightlessness that makes the High Frontier so exciting. I grew up in the islands, enjoying the three dimensions of snorkel and SCUBA, and have always fantasized about being free to dive and dive forever, like a dolphin, coming up for air only rarely and with a graceful leap through the thin gasseous atmosphere. But that's still not it.

  Outer space is simply the next place to go. Like a virus or mold on a tree, humans will multiply across the entire surface of something and begin looking for more. Life will extend her reach beyond the tidal pool and the agent of mother nature shall be us!

  There's nothing to do in space either, unless you count fiddling with a petri dish in zero G. Or unless you go to Mars. Or back to the moon. Or to Ganymede. There is literally an entire Universe to explore and I for one think the space station is an excellent baby step in that direction.

  So will Tito be the first of many to visit our version of the half-finished Hilton in outer space in 2001? The Russians are talking to other rich adventurers who wouldn't mind giving the Red Star a multimillion dollar boost into orbit ... so long as they can hitch a ride.

  The wealthy have always enjoyed exotic and dangerous adventures. Think safaris and world cruises, for example. What are the prospects for those of us without twenty million bucks to spare?

  The hunger for space tourism is strong! More than a third of 1,500 families surveyed said they would be interested in taking a two-week vacation in the space shuttle, and 7.5 percent of the interested families said they would be willing to pay $100,000 or more per person for the trip. About 42 percent said they would be willing to travel in a space cruise vessel that offered accommodations similar to those of an oceangoing vessel.

  There are dozens of sites that fuel this hunger for extraterrestrial travel. The links today are jam packed with them. You can follow them to learn all about vacations in the sky.

  But for some of us, a short trip to orbit and back will never be enough. We must settle the next wilderness, and like Adam and Lucy, we must leave our Olduvai Eden and make our place on new worlds.

  Once we could not cross the oceans or travel through the sky. Once we had no fire and no clothing to protect us from the elements. But humans have always learned to overcome the obstacles of nature given time and determination. A little cash incentive never hurt either, and so the X Prize was set up to encourage the private development of space technology.

  The ten million dollar X Prize will be awarded to the first group or company to send a resusable, three person spacecraft 100Km into the sky, preferrably twice in two weeks. Tito paid twice that for his UltraDeluxe Vacation Package, and it cost the Russians $40 million just to send their rocket to the space station. So an award of ten million is probably chicken feed ... but I am certain that somebody will win it someday.

  Tourism to space is first. Short trips to orbit, or even the moon, are like dipping our toes into the water, and will only whet our appetites for more. Dennis Tito has pointed the way and we shall follow. The urge to spread our seed across the sky as the very stars will burn like rocket juice, pushing and goading and calling us home.