Sure enough, Virgin Galactic says 77 percent of its customers are male. And many of those leading the charge to the cosmos are deep-pocketed, ample-ego men like Mr. Branson, 62, who in addition to running the billion-dollar Virgin Group also recently became the oldest man to kite surf across the English Channel (really). And Virgin Galactic’s own SpaceShipTwo happens to be based on a craft — SpaceShipOne — that was backed by the Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. (In 2004 SpaceShipOne became the first privately developed manned vehicle to reach space. It carried a single pilot; no tourists were allowed.)

Then there’s Elon Musk, the dashing chairman of Tesla Motors who founded the SpaceX company, which develops rockets, who hopes to cart astronauts and cargo aloft. SpaceX also promises, according to a spokeswoman, to ultimately “make life interplanetary.”

Jeff Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, meanwhile, has Blue Origin, a media-shy operation promising “human access to space at dramatically lower cost and increased reliability” with suborbital flights and other orbital services, according to the Web site.

Indeed, companies planning to offer suborbital trips are already involved in the type of service boasts and fare battles common among airlines, whose early days are often likened to the current state of space companies. While Virgin Galactic, for example, is charging $200,000, Space Adventures, working with Texas-based Armadillo Aerospace, says it can get you there for about half that. And that’s not even the cheapest: a company called XCOR Aerospace is working on a nifty little space coupe called the Lynx, which would offer a two-person flight — just you and the pilot — for $95,000.

“This is more like the ‘Right Stuff’-kind of experience,” said Col. Richard Searfoss, a company test pilot, in a promotional video on the Web site. Missions are expected to start by 2014.

Once the flights are operational, they will be brief and action-packed. SpaceShipTwo, for instance, will carry six passengers and two pilots. Attached to a twin-fuselage jet, it will take off from Spaceport America, a sleek, futuristic complex on a desolate patch of ranchland in southern New Mexico. It will then cruise to about 50,000 feet, where it will detach and tip skyward, blasting off toward higher orbit. Noise and some serious G-forces will ensue, but once customers reach 60 miles or so, they will coast along in almost complete silence. (Except for your gabby co-astronauts, no doubt.)