A Sydney Morning Herald blog entry reports that a number of travel agents in Australia have signed up to sell SpaceShipTwo flights for Virgin Galactic. Nine travel agents around the country will offer the flights at A$264,000 a ticket, starting with a A$26,000 deposit. Five Australians, including two from the Australian science magazine Cosmos, already purchased seats before the travel agents were selected.

What’s more interesting, though, are the comments to the post left by readers. Yes, there are a few critics asking why people would spend money on a suborbital spaceflight when that money “could be so well spent down here on earth.” (As if the money was actually being spent in outer space.) Many more people seemed interested, if they had the money, or just quipped jokes. “Hope the $260K includes food & drinks?”

MSNBC’s Alan Boyle checks in with PlanetSpace, one of the lesser-known space tourism companies. PlanetSpace evolved from Canadian Arrow, one of the two Canadian X Prize entrants (The da Vinci Project being the other); Canadian Arrow planned to develop a vehicle similar to the V-2 for suborbital spaceflights. Most of the focus of the report is on the company’s “Silver Dart” orbital spacecraft, which was proposed for NASA’s COTS program but did not make the cut. Still, the company is proceeding on several fronts, including negotiating a Space Act agreement with an unnamed NASA center, working with the Canadian Space Agency on plans for an orbital spaceport in Canada, and may get involved with ESA’s space tourism initiative.

It’s difficult to tell how seriously to take all of these developments. Entrepreneurial ventures will often explore many avenues to seek markets and funding, but run the risk of spreading themselves too thin. It’s notable what the MSNBC report doesn’t discuss: the progress on the Canadian Arrow vehicle itself, which is still mentioned on the PlanetSpace site but isn’t brought up in the article other than the fact that clusters of the booster would be used to launch the Silver Dart. (Also unclear is how the Chicago-based PlanetSpace could participate in the ESA program; at the very least, they would have to establish a European subsidiary or partner with a European company.) PlanetSpace chairman Chirinjeev Kathuria said that many of his company’s plans have to stay confidential for now while details are worked out. That’s fine, but progress is even better.