End NASA's monopoly on the right stuff!

■"Private Company Plans $100 Million Tour Around the Moon: Seeking adventurers with deep pockets for a cozy journey on a Russian space vehicle," by John Schwartz, New York Times, 10 August 2005, p. A10.

We're to the point with the shuttle where we're just happy if they get back on the ground without blowing up. This is where we're at in manned space flight three and a half decades after first walking on the moon.

I want to die in space. Always have, and always will. Not have my ashes shot into orbit-actually die somewhere off-planet. My kids aren't getting all my money. No. Some private space company will get it.

Unfortunately, I can't put together $100 million to fly around the moon, although I wish Esquire or the Hearst Corp. would come up for it (I'd promise a multi-year storyline!).

Anyway, I need for my kids to grow up first, but I will keep myself in shape and think hard about my investments over the next couple of decades (I expect the physical rigors of the trip to decline dramatically once private-sector space-faring takes off for real in coming years).

Trip would be about 20 days for two tourists, plus the Russian pilot (not a bad gig to get paid to drive). You go up in one craft, booster rocket in another. You dock in orbit and then ride the booster to the moon, jettisoning it along the way. Slingshot around the moon for the return and hit the ground in Kazakstan (I like ground landings versus water ones).

Sounds pretty cool to me.

Stuff like this and Burt Rutan's recent triumph is great. We need desperately to desanctify the whole space thing-stop treating them as God-like heroes and stop acting like every time one dies it's a national tragedy. We need a lot of people trying a lot of things, with many getting killed (inevitably) but the industry learning along the way-just like it was with air flight. Apollo was cool, but it's been all downhill from there. Time for the government to get out of the space business and let it actually become a business. Then what the military will do is simply police the environs instead of plotting and perhaps actually waging star wars someday.

We need to put "frontier" back behind "final." "War zone" sucks as an alternative.