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:

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!

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 Not it's fault for being out of date either; I got it directly from a nuclear engineer familiar with the field, so it's rather hard to get any closer to the story then that.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.