Travelling to space may be affordable for the massses in the near future.

This was the consensus of leaders of the private space industry who gathered in the New Mexico desert for the seventh annual International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight.

Aside from officials from commercial space firms such as Space X, Sierra Nevada, Bigelow Aerospace and XCOR, officials from NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration joined the symposium which discussed the growing field of commercial spaceflight.

Among the topics tackled in the two-day gathering were the challenges of lowering the cost of launching people and cargo to orbit and building relationships for international collaboration in space.

Many of the companies who attended are in the process of building and test-flying spacecraft that aims to carry paying passengers to suborbital and orbital space.

Virgin Galactic, a frontrunner in the race to launch the first space tourists aboard comemrcial spaceships, will test flight its SpaceShip Two suborbital vehicle in the next few years.

The world's first commercial spaceport, Spaceport America, is now being built near Truth or Consequences, N. M. with the facility's modern hangar terminar dedicated in a ceremony last week.