Why tech nerds are especially drawn to rocket travel.

"There's a documentary called Orphans of Apollo that's stated this well," he explained. "There's a generation of us, who are the tech leaders of today, who were universally inspired to go into science and technology because of the NASA Lunar Space Program. And the reason the movie is called Orphans of Apollo is because, in many ways, we feel orphaned by the fact that the space industry has not done a good job of capitalizing on that momentum of what many of us believed were the first steps into space, carrying the mission of human space flight farther and farther into deep space."

"The same kids who grew up wanting to be computer engineers are the same kids who grew up watching Star Trek, OK?" says Eric Anderson, CEO of Space Adventures, the Vienna, Va.-based company that facilitates space travel for civilians. (Garriott is on the board of Space Adventures, and Dyson and Brin were early investors.)

"Technology entrepreneurs are the ones with the technical curiosity, the desire to do new things and explore new territory," says Dyson. "And this is the ultimate new territory. There was a belief once, too, that America was something new and unnecessary." Dyson believes we will eventually be colonizing other planets. Like Garriott, she also has space in her blood. In the late '50s, her father, physicist Freeman Dyson, worked on using nuclear pulse propulsion to vault rockets into space. Esther was 7 at the time, and she recalls thinking that, naturally, one day, she would get to travel in one.

Now, these techies-made-good finally have a way to get to space. If they have the means, they come to Anderson. "Entrepreneurs take calculated risks," Anderson says. "They're willing to spend their life and time and money doing things that they know might fail." And he's willing to help them try for a slice off the top. His is a private company, and he would not reveal the terms of the contracts—though most of money goes to the Russians, who do all the heavy lifting. (Currently, there are no space-tourism flights leaving from American soil, and, according to a NASA spokesman, there won't be for some time.)

The Russians, on the other hand, have been all too happy to oblige. Once the vanguard of space exploration, they suffered their own version of Garriott's bubble bust. In 1991, the Soviet state fell and with it went the massive state subsidies for their space program. In 2000, Garriott and Anderson approached the Russians to see if they wanted to profit from this decaying part of their infrastructure, too. After the obligatory pooh-poohing, the Russians agreed to sell one seat on the three-seat Soyuz rockets they send up to the International Space Station. (NASA also buys seats on the Russian rockets, for $51 million per seat, which is still cheaper than building their own or sending up the space shuttle, which also happens to have a worse safety record than the Russian-made Soyuz.)

Space Adventures forks over most of the hefty fee to the Russians, who take the Space Tourist up to the International Space Station for about a fortnight. (The tourists themselves insist on being called "Space Explorers.") Before they go, however, each space tourist must train for five months (900 hours) in the isolation of Star City, a secret hamlet just outside of Moscow that only recently started appearing on maps. There, working alongside Russian cosmonauts and some American astronauts, they work to attain "user level" proficiency in all things rocket: communication, emergency, life-support, electronics, and rocket-propulsion systems. It is all in Russian. (Dyson speaks the language; Garriott had a translator.) They undergo turns in the centrifuge and are subjected to endoscopies and colonoscopies. They are sent on zero-gravity "parabola" flights, which are fun with a caveat. ("The Americans try not to make you sick," says Dyson. "The Russians try to make you sick.") There's survival training in the wilderness, including a bout in a tiny space capsule stranded at sea in which you have less than 90 minutes and very limited space to change out of your spacesuit. Garriott says he emerged black and blue, having failed on his first attempt: The capsule heated up so much that his core body temperature became dangerously high.