Branson’s spaceship to begin test flights this year
Mr Branson, who plans to carry tourists on short flights into space by 2010, revealed models and photographs of the newest version of SpaceShipTwo and also the twin-fuselage WhiteKnightTwo, which will ferry SpaceShipTwo into the atmosphere for a midair launch.
Virgin Galactic, part of Mr Branson’s airline, vacation and retail company Virgin Group, has 200 people signed up and $30 million (€20.3m) in deposits for the rides, which cost about $200,000 (€135,606) per person, with 85,000 people having expressed interest.
Passengers already signed up include ex Dallas star Victoria Principal, physicist Stephen Hawking and designer Philippe Starck.
“2008 is really going to be the year of the spaceship,” Mr Branson, president of the Virgin Atlantic airline, told a press conference on Wednesday.
“The designs of both the mothership and the new spaceship are absolutely beautiful and surpass any expectations for the future of commercial spaceflight that we had when first registering the name Virgin Galactic in 1999,” he said.
The two vessels are being built by Scaled Composites, an aircraft builder in Mojave, California, with plans to provide paying customers flights into suborbital space 112km above the earth.
With its numerous round windows providing views on all sides, SpaceShipTwo will carry two crew and six passengers, who will experience five minutes of zero gravity once in space.
The first flight is expected in 2009.
Natasha Pavlovich, a native of Yugoslavia and member of the 100 “founders” selected for the earliest flights, said she was crossing her fingers to be on the first tourist flight, due in 2010.
“I will become the first astronaut from former Yugoslavia,” she said.
“I want to see with my own eyes God’s creation.”
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 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 (€13.5m). A second American, a South African and an Iranian have since followed the same way.
