Am I right in thinking that people on these forums generally can't afford $25m to go into space?

Well a new option is now avaiable to you - for the measly price of €150,000!

Introducing: The Space Jet.

I really dont trust aeroplanes that go into space. they just dont look safe and how can they come back into land? the air resistance must be huge so the heat they would be subject to!

However I would still like to go! lol But it only lasts an hour and a half!

this is a suborbital craft. "Space", in this case, is a certain altitude, not orbit. In this case, the amount of energy needed to slow it down is small enough for such a design to work, if correctly engineered. Rutan proved this with SpaceShipOne.
You need to do something a little more special for orbital space craft, as the speeds are much higher...
IMHO, space planes are the best way to go outside of space elevators. Rockets (the vessel, not the engine) as they are today are simply too wasteful. A "black-horse project" like space plane is the one I'd suggest.
For traveling within the solar system (read "outside Earth orbit") a thermonuclear Orion is the way to go. Then, once we get good thermonuclear generators, the photo-rocket can get us to other stars... Though i doubt it'll come to that.

It is hard to argue with success.

There were nuclear-powered engines developed for Apollo abandoned for political reasons that are quite a bit more environmentally friendly that the long series of thermonuclear warheads popping behind a ship While not the best fuel it could've very easily made do with water.

Considering we can't launch a simple probe though without an anti-nuclear rally at KSC though I don't suspect it'll ever become popular again, at least not in the Western world, even if it did have the potential to shoot us to Mars in weeks instead of months or years, regardless of relative orbital positions. (I award myself the run-on sentence of the week award)

There's a really good wiki entry on it. It leaves out a few interesting things, mostly more recent technological advances, but it's a great read even without being up to date. Not it's fault for being out of date either; I got it directly from a nuclear engineer familiar with the field, so it's rather hard to get any closer to the story then that.

My father had worked on the original nuclear engine project back in the space race days of the 1960s. Work was done at the Space Nuclear Propulsion Laboratory in Jackass Flats Nevada. They test fired a few times. The facility is now an electronic warfare test range where my brother has help to develop toys for Iraq.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_thermal_rocket

Just if anybody else was interested.