Oh I forgot the super rich will stay super rich..............

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7298511.stm

Hmm maybe global warming hysteria will put an end to it?

Virgin plan to do their own space vehicle it seems

Link

Maybe the super rich are planning to abandon the earth, ala. Stark.

Historically, two of the biggest problems with spaceflight have been:

1. Much of it is run by the government and therefore a pork program.
2. It's all heavily regulated by governments, and therefore low-cost alternatives can't get off the ground (literally).
3. Flight rates are very low, so economies of scale don't exist.

To give an example, a space shuttle flight costs about $200,000,000... but four space shuttle flights a year costs about $4,000,000,000. The difference between the basic cost of a flight and the total cost of four flights a year is the fixed costs of running the facilities required to fly them; increasing the flight rate by a factor of five wouldn't much more than double the total cost per year, if that was technically possible.

Right now, the only market large enough to get the flight rates high enough for economies of scale to pull prices down is tourism. Transatlantic flights would be expensive too, if 747s only flew a couple of times a year with a handful of people on board; high flight rates have brought prices down close to the cost of the fuel.