The space tourism business is pretty bustling these days as companies vie to send paying customers on suborbital flights into space. Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin is one such company, but it has been quite secretive in the past with respect to its space launches.

The end of each year seems to be the appropriate time to review the highlights of the past year. The journal Nature has dramatic pictures included with its 2010 science highlights, and it’s well worth a look.

The official rolling out ceremony of Virgin SpaceShip (VSS) Enterprise occurred on Monday, December 7, 2009 at the Mojave Spaceport in California, United States. Watch the video of the historic event in space tourism.

Virgin Galactic will formally unveil its new SpaceShipTwo spacecraft on Monday afternoon, December 7, 2009, at the Mojave Spaceport in California, as one of the important steps toward eventually providing suborbital space flights for paying customers.

In New Mexico, the world’s first facility, which will be used exclusively to send paying customers into space, has broken ground in the remote desert. While the project is expensive, the costs of each space trip are still quite pricey, too!

Win a round-trip ticket into space onboard one of Virgin Galactic’s private fleet of spacecraft. The contest by Australia’s Virgin Blue, and co-sponsored by U.S.A.’s Mojave Aerospace Ventures, will award twenty-five million frequent flyer miles to one lucky space traveler.

The WhiteKnightTwo airship made its first test flight on Sunday, December 21, 2008, as it flew about 59 minutes above the Mojave Air and Space Port in California, U.S.A.

Spaceport America, in New Mexico, has been granted a license for vertical and horizontal launches from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The facility will initially provide suborbital space flights for paying customers and other payloads.

International space tourist and Texas video game billionaire Richard Garriott has made the International Space Station his kingdom for the next ten days, and for a mere US $30 million.

Richard Garriott, son of Owen Garriot, a US Shuttle and Skylab astronaut, and co-founder of gaming company Origin Systems, is the world’s sixth space tourist, the world’s first second-generation astronaut and the first to truly make the US $30m flight a commercial venture that could eventually pay for itself.