Real G
...All kidding aside, it is remarkable that non-astronauts can make trips to space now...
Only the timing. I think it was and is inevitable, that there will be commercial, civilian space travel. It's a matter of time, given our technological advances over the past hundred years, and their trajectories into the future. There are stumbling blocks, but they're not in the fields of technology that go into blasting off from a gravity well. They're more features of fields like our nature, and its impact on international politics-the old story of "If we don't destroy ourselves, first..."
Flight came about the same way. At the turn of the last century, it became more and more likely that someone would work it out. The technological prerequisites were present, and it just took someone to piece them together, a la James Burke's "Connections" or "The Day the Universe Changed".