Branson reveals tourist spaceship designs

British billionaire Richard Branson hailed the “year of the spaceship” as he unveiled the designs of two crafts which could help take the first tourists into space.

Work on 'SpaceShipTwo', and its mothership 'White Knight Two', is nearing completion and flight tests will begin later this year.

Branson said this “historic occasion” could help “to answer key questions about Earth’s climate and the mysteries of the universe”.

A Virgin Galactic spokeswoman said more than 200 people had joined the firm’s cadre of future astronauts, with 80 having been through their medical assessment and centrifuge training.

Speaking at the America Museum of Natural History in New York yesterday, he said: “If our new system could carry only people into space, that would be enough for me, because of the transforming effect it will have on the thousands who will travel with us.

“It is quite clear from every astronaut that I’ve ever spoken to that seeing the planet from out there, surrounded by the incredibly thin protective layer of atmosphere, helps one to wake up to the fragility of the small portion of the planet’s mass that we inhabit, and to the importance of protecting the Earth.”

But he said the spaceships would also be able to launch small payloads and satellites at a low cost.

“This system offers tremendous potential to researchers who will be able to fly experiments much more often than before, helping to answer key questions about Earth’s climate and the mysteries of the universe,” he said.

The businessman said space was “the final frontier that is so essential to the future of civilisation on this planet”.

He also defended the impact of aviation on the environment, saying that while the industry needed to become more carbon efficient, “seemingly benign industries such as IT have in fact overtaken aviation in terms of their CO2 output”.

“Industries like this would benefit enormously from the ability to launch low earth orbit satellites that could literally take some of the heat out of the planet, for example, by serving someday as the repository of our information technology,” he added.

He said the two spaceships would “help change the paradigm of our relationship to space, achieving an era where space accessibility becomes a commercial and scientific norm, rather than an exception”.

Richard said the system could be developed into a passenger-carrying vehicle, but admitted “that may not happen for some time”.

“But the first generation of space tourists, many of whom are with us today, will be paving the way as they marvel at the beauty of our planet and experience the freedom of weightlessness and the blackness of space”.

He also said that if the project proved a commercial success, investment in both space launch systems and space technology “could rival the scale of investment in the mobile phone and internet technologies after they were unlocked from their military origins and thrown open to the private sector”.

The WK2 mothership, the world’s largest all-carbon composite aircraft, is expected to begin flight testing in the summer and SpaceShipTwo is almost 60% complete.