Virgin Atlantic has unveiled the first commercial passenger spaceship, a sleek black-and-white vessel that represents an expensive gamble on creating a commercial space tourism industry.
The company hopes the winged, minivan-sized
SpaceShipTwowill rocket tourists into zero gravity beginning in two or three years.
"This will be the start of commercial space travel," Virgin Atlantic Airways founder and billionaire Richard Branson said at the launch in California's Mojave Desert. "You become an astronaut."
The project, with a $450 million budget, would see the construction of six commercial spaceships that would take passengers high enough to achieve weightlessness and see the curvature of Earth set against the backdrop of space.
A twin-hulled aircraft named
Evewould carry
SpaceShipTwo to an altitude of about 20,000 metres before releasing it. The spaceship would then fire its onboard rocket engines, climbing to about 100kms above Earth.
The trip would take about 2-1/2 hours, with passengers experiencing about five minutes of weightlessness.
Some 300 aspiring astronauts have put down deposits for the $200,000 ride, which includes three days of training.
Eventually, Virgin Galactic, the offshoot of Virgin Atlantic, may offer suborbital travel that could dramatically cut the length of flights.
"Subject to American government permission, we may well start developing a program to try to take people from continent to continent, you know, two hours from Los Angeles to Australia," Mr Branson said in an interview with Reuters TV. "I can't promise that we're going to be able to do it, but if you don't try things you don't succeed, so we'll definitely give it a go."
Other potential business ventures include flying scientists and experiments and launching small payloads into space.
Mr Branson hired aircraft designer Burt Rutan and his team at Scaled Composites to build the commercial spaceship fleet after a Rutan prototype named
SpaceShipOnewon the $10 million Ansari X Prize in 2004 for the first private piloted spaceflight.
SpaceShipOne, which is on display at the National Air & Space Museum in Washington, made three suborbital flights.
Commercial space flight has been a dream for decades, but the 2004 flight was the first proof that industry might be able to achieve it without the help of government, which historically has dominated space travel.
A lethal 2007 explosion during a rocket engine test by Scaled Composites, however, illustrated the danger and risk to creating a safe and profitable venture.
Mr Branson said the flights would be safer than Nasa's Space Shuttle.
"I think because it's so much younger, it's just that much safer than what Nasa has done using old technology which is 50, 60 years old," he said.
REUTERS