'2008 - year of the spaceship'
2008-01-24 07:15
New York - Entrepreneur Richard
Branson on Wednesday unveiled a model of the spaceship he hopes
will be the first to take paying passengers into space on a
regular basis next year.
Branson, whose Virgin Galactic is one of several commercial
enterprises vying to offer the ultimate in sightseeing, said
his SpaceShipTwo will start test flights later this year.
"2008 is going to be the year of the
spaceship. We're excited about this, and everything it will
do," said Branson at a media event at the American Museum of
Natural History in Manhattan."
Virgin Galactic, part of Branson's airline, vacation and
retail company Virgin Group, has more than 200 people signed up
and $30m in deposits for the rides, which cost about
$200 000 per person.
The company has signed up 150 passengers, including
physicist Stephen Hawking, former soap star Victoria Principal
and designer Philippe Starck.
The space trips, from a launching pad to be built in New
Mexico, are expected to take about two and a half hours, with
about five minutes of weightlessness.
SpaceShipOne and its launch aircraft WhiteKnightTwo, also
unveiled on Wednesday, were designed by Burt Rutan, whose
SpaceShipOne collected the Ansari X Prize for privately funded
space flight in 2004.
Branson teamed up with Rutan shortly after to design a
sub-orbital spacecraft for Virgin Galactic.
Sub-orbital flight is the easiest and briefest form of
space travel, where the spacecraft technically reaches space -
about 100km above sea level - but then falls back
to Earth without completing a revolution of the Earth.
Virgin Galactic is only one of several high-profile
contenders in the new commercial space race.
Others include Europe's EADS Astrium; Blue Origin, started
by Amazon.com Inc founder Jeff Bezos; Space Exploration
Technologies Corp (SpaceX), created by PayPal founder Elon
Musk; Rocketplane Kistler, and hotelier Robert Bigelow.
The leader in the budding sector is Space Adventures of
Vienna, Virginia, which started the space tourism phenomenon in
2001 when it put US businessman Dennis Tito on a Russian
Soyuz spacecraft headed for the International Space Station for
a reported $20m. It has since sent another four paying
customers into space the same way.