I find the lower graph ("Consumption Spreads Faster Today") in this image from a New York Times op-ed to be quite fascinating. It nicely illustrates how goods that start out as luxuries for the rich eventually become low cost commodities owned by most everyone (at least within a developed country). In fact, a middle-class household may own several models of a previously expensive product: Study: Nearly 35% of US Households with a Vehicle Have at Least Three - Green Car Congress. The op-ed makes the point that this process of commoditization is accelerating as seen, for example, with cellphones and flat TVs.

I'd like to see a similar graph for services such as airline flights, restaurant dinners, week-long vacations in Florida, etc. I'm sure it would look quite similar. I remember, for example, that long distance bus travel in the US was still common into the 1970s but mostly disappeared after deregulation of the airlines and the resulting big drop in airfares in the 1980s. (A similar process has happened in Europe in the past decade or so.)

No, I'm not going to claim that a trip to space will get as cheap as a flight from New York to L.A. anytime soon or that every middle class family will be taking a vacation in space by 2015. However, in terms of technology, there is no fundamental reason the same economies of scale cannot eventually bring the price of a space flight (first suborbital and later orbital) down to the level that a middle class person could afford after saving assiduously for a few years just as he or she might do today to take a dream vacation in a distant country. I don't know how many years "eventually" will span. Depends on the actions of a lot of players. However, I do know that the process of bringing spaceflight within reach of the common person will never happen without first starting with high prices to an upscale market.