“Your Spaceflight Manual – How you could be a tourist in space within 20 years” byDavid Ashford, Managing Director of Bristol Spaceplanes, and co-author Patrick Collins, is cited as the first reference (page 22) in the report General Public Space Travel and Tourism, produced jointly by NASA and the Space Transportation Association.
This book, of which the first edition was published in 1990, was the first book to seriously discuss the vital importance of space tourism for generating commercial revenues from crewed space activities, and so for opening the space frontier to humanity. As of 1998 it remains the only book on the subject, although space tourism is likely to become one of the largest commercial activities in space.
Being selected as the leading reference in NASA’s first ever report on this subject is perhaps the start of this book’s achieving full recognition as the pioneering document that it is. With the recent growth of interest in low-cost reusable launch vehicles, the sub-title’s prediction for 2010 is still on target!
More reactions at: NASA/STA General Public Space Travel and Tourism Report a “Landmark”