Bigelow, who made his fortune running Budget Suites, may be the United States' largest funder of research into the paranormal. The owner of a chain of hotels in Nevada, Texas and Arizona, Bigelow bought a ranch in Utah where residents had reported unearthly lights and other strange occurrences and staffed it with a full-time veterinarian and two scientists to monitor any alienlike activity. He founded the National Institute for Discovery Science, which sponsors research into UFOs and other paranormal phenomena and collects accounts of sightings and other unexplained events from the public.

The University of Nevada at Las Vegas has also received much of his largess. Bigelow has donated millions of dollars for the construction of the Bigelow Physics Building as well as the UNLV Bigelow Chair of Consciousness Studies, which is dedicated to the "rational investigation of the mysteries of human awareness, including the possibility of the persistence of consciousness after death."

Now he's poised to spend a lot more. Bigelow Aerospace recently filed an application to open up space to commercial interests with the creation of a space station -- a privilege currently restricted to NASA and the Russian aerospace program -- and, eventually, "cruise ships" for tourists. Bigelow says he can build the first installment of his space station in two years, and reports that his aerospace engineers are already working on the modules of a research station for eventual use by private companies seeking to do research in microgravitational climes. But the major hurdle isn't building the station, it's getting permission from the Federal Aviation Administration to bring it into space, and NASA's assistance in launching it. Bigelow (who refuses to be photographed by or for the press, and does not do TV interviews) recently hired the Washington law firm Patton Boggs to help take his application through the FAA's approval process -- one that no one else has ever completed.

For Bigelow, the connection between the paranormal and the commercialization of space is less obvious than you might think. For an ardent believer in UFOs and a host of other phenomena most Americans expect to read about only in tabloids, Bigelow is realistic about what he might find in space. Building a space station is less about getting closer to aliens than it is about making the wonders of space available to all, or at least more Americans, and about a firm faith in the power of commercialization to bring change -- not to mention a deep grudge against one of Bigelow's least favorite government agencies, NASA.

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You've written before about the need to commercialize space. What does that mean, and how does it compare to the prevailing attitude abut space, especially NASA's perspective?

It's quite insidious. NASA's version of commercialization is not privatization. Those are two very different words in NASA's mentality. NASA's view of commercialization is: "We, NASA, own everything. We own all the hardware. We own the facilities to move people back and forth, and when they get there, we own that facility too."

So in our scheme of commercializing things, we intend to be in business. They are a federal agency that's tax exempt and that gets $14 billion a year. And so they are paying no income taxes and here they are absolutely in business. They take 100 percent of the revenue of any company that pays them to do anything. And that's wrong; that's absolutely dead wrong. And it's a huge competitor to free enterprise.

Why do you think NASA has been reluctant to allow tourists in space, like Dennis Tito, for example?

Well, it's the mentality that "we own space." NASA stands for "No Access to Space for Americans" -- that's what it stands for to me and to most Americans. NASA has exclusive control and a lock on everything having to do with space, except for the Russian side. And they were just beyond belief in being rude and obnoxious [in response to Dennis Tito's trip]. It was just embarrassing to this country.

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