I agree that Lunar fly-bys will probably be the next big tourist routine -- probably something along the lines of Bigelow's cycler scheme, albeit considerably more modest than that. As a guess, I'd put the first tourist flight around the moon at 2012. Surface tourism might happen five or ten years later than that.

Doing a small lunar cycler wouldn't necessarily require much in the way of new launch vehicle developments... a workable (if tiny) cycler could be launched into LEO atop a Soyuz booster, then manned (and made habitable) with a Soyuz and fueled with a Progress, every time it begins a new trip to the moon. The marginal costs for each flyby would probably be on the order of $30-$40 million; if you could find tourists willing to pay $50 million per ride, you could probably have the cycler itself amortized within the first 5-10 flights...

Of course, that's if you wanted to get to the moon *now*. A much better way to do it would be to first develop the "Big Soyuz" that I'm always ranting about, so you can fly 3 - 6 tourists at once, and then develop some ultra-cheap Big Dumb Boosters that can put a larger cycler and its refueling modules into orbit. Although I have no actual evidence that a "Big Soyuz" is being worked on, I'm certain that *somebody* in Russia must be thinking about it. As for the Big Dumb Boosters -- I have great hopes for Microcosm's Scorpius project might accomplish. (They're aiming for < $500 per pound, and I think they have a good chance of achieving it). Anyhow, once all of these pieces have fallen into place (which I'm guessing will take a decade or so), it will probably be quite lucrative to fly a handfull of tourists around the moon for $15 million per person or so. (And mere orbital tourism will probably drop to $5-$10 million).

Cheers,

Nathan.