I just interviewed Burt Rutan, and here’s what he had to say about the importance of fun:
[Space tourism is] going to be a big industry. Just like personal computers. But it’s mainly just for fun. You’ve got to have thousands, tens of thousands, of people enjoying it in order to figure out what to do with it. We never would have invented the use of the Internet, the communication, and the commerce, and everything if you had just a few dozen people with computers. So I look at this suborbital phase that we’ll go through, and I think we’ll always have suborbital space flight, but I think the main thing is, is that people are going to flat enjoy it. And it’s going to be absolutely thrilling. They’re going to be floating their bodies around big cabins. It’s not going to be just like the SpaceShipOne flights. There’s going to be a lot more things you can do for the experience.
Read the whole interview here.