You’ve backpacked through Asia, hiked the America’s, hopped the Eurorail across Europe, safaried in Africa and dog sledded your way throughout Antarctica…and you have a foggy recollection of spending some time in Australia, although you can’t be 100% sure – there may have been a lot of lager involved…

If you’re feeling a case of the been-there-done-that’s, you only have to wait a few more years – which is probably the amount of time it will take you to pawn off all of your possessions,  shake down your family and closest friends, and climb the ranks in your local mafia so that you can amass enough money to afford a trip to the final frontier… space.

Virgin Galactic (see what they did there?  Galactic sounds kinda like Atlantic?  clever.) has announced that, estimated to begin in the year 2012, you will have the opportunity to travel into outer space – an opportunity that, so far, only professional astronauts have had.  Their Website can’t stress “safety” enough – new technology and a 3-day pre-flight training seminar will supposedly leave you ready to board one of their state-of-the-art spaceships (complete with comfort-first seats and amenities and panoramic windows) and venture out into the wild black and blue yonder.

Virgin Galactic’s affordable pricetag:  $200,000 – with plans to reduce the cost as much as possible as quickly as possible in order to maximize the number of people who will be able to take advantage of this opportunity.

Another company, Galactic Suite Limited, is also set to voyage into outer space, although both Galactic Suite Limited and Virgin Galactic are adamant that there is no race – both companies are independently financed and will start their engines only once exhaustive test flights and trial runs have been successfully completed.

While Virgin’s trip is a there-and-back, relatively quick journey, Galactic Suite Limited’s experience will allow amateur astronauts an extended stay in orbit aboard The Galactic Suite Space Resort.

The experience will begin on a private tropical island where your “challenging and exhilarating” briefed astronaut space training program will take place.  After that, it’s go time and you will be launched into space on their SpaceShip, on track to join up with their SpaceResort.  Once there, you will spend 3 nights in a private lux pod room – all for the low, low price of $4,000,000!

…imagine…going from 0 km/hr to 28,000 km/hr in 10 minutes…traveling around the world in 90 minutes…watching 15 sunsets in one day…experiencing total weightlessness…