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Virgin entrepreneur Richard Branson today revealed a mock-up of the rocket-propelled spaceplane that will take Virgin Galactic business customers into sub-orbital space flight. Tickets on a Virgin Galactic flight are expected to cost $ 190,000, a price that isn't bad considering that the spacecraft which Branson revealed today can only carry a total of 8 people, 6 passengers and 2 pilots, on the sub-orbital flight at an altitude of 140km.
The design of the yet unnamed craft was based upon the successful SpaceShipOne craft which was built by pioneer Burt Rutan, the first engineering beauty which claims the title for the first privately built vehicle to reach space in 2004. Since the success of SpaceShipOne, Virgin Group later created Virgin Galactic, the space-faring division of Virgin Atlantic and has contracted Rutan's company Scaled
Composites to design and build a passenger version of SpaceShipOne. Virgin Galactic will own and operate at least five
spaceships and two motherships which carry the spaceships up to approximately 50,000ft.
The passenger flights which could begin as early as 2009, will
take off from the purpose-built 5m facility called Spaceport America in the
New Mexico desert, technically the first private spaceport on earth. Virgin claimed back in July that they had already received 150 space-flight bookings already and that 60,000 potential customers had registered interest in the flights. It's just like Star Trek really, just without the faster than light engines.
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