Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC World Service. I'm Ed Butler today. I'm here in

Park City, Utah, up in the American Rockies, hearing from entrepreneurs and experts in the business

of commercial space exploration. And yes, it really can be a business. We can see the advantages,

see the opportunities, and really can be a business. We can see the advantages, see the opportunities,

and really start the industrialization of space

and expanding human society to new places.

There's even money to be made collecting space junk these days.

I call it cosmic beachcombe.

You go up there and I'm going to put it into a space junkyard

and this is more manufacturing in space.

Cashing in on the cosmos, that's Business Daily from the BBC.

It's a chilly and a bit of a perilous journey through deep snow up to the Future in Review conference hall here in Park City, Utah.

We're some two and a half thousand metres up in the rocky mountains right now with spectacular views in front of me of the pine forests lining the dramatic ski slopes they have here.

The trees are heaving with last night's fresh snow shower, but some of the delegates at this future-facing technology conference have their eyes cast rather more upwards, the skies and beyond.

The massive economic potential, they say, that a whole range of businesses are seeing beyond our own planet.

We should be in space within weeks, not months, and then we'll be in space with myself in months, not years, and then we'll be in space with myself in months, not years,

and then we'll be in space with people not too long after that.

So we've got a very, very exciting couple of months ahead.

The words there of Richard Branson.

He's the British space tourism pioneer.

Speaking to CNBC just a few days ago, he's describing the imminent launch of his Virgin Galactic near-orbit space flights.

The going rate to board one of these will be about a quarter of a million dollars, we're told,

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