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Virgin Galactic, founded by Sir Richard Branson, plans to build the world’s first commercial spaceport in New Mexico. Its suborbital flights will cost $190,000 and reach an altitude of 108 km. The first two spaceships will be named Enterprise and Voyager, respectively. Celebrities such as William Shatner and Sigourney Weaver have already signed up for flights.
Virgin Galactic is one of the world’s first space tourism companies, founded by Sir Richard Branson as part of the worldwide Virgin Group. It plans to build the world’s first commercial spaceport, Spaceport America, (formerly Southwest Regional Spaceport) in Upham, New Mexico, an unincorporated, uninhabited city near the city of Las Cruces.
The founding and continued development of Virgin Galactic is a daydream for space enthusiasts who knew this day would come. The flight vehicle will be based on the successful SpaceShipOne design, which won the Ansari X-Prize for space tourism in 2004. SpaceShipTwo, or Virgin SpaceShip (VSS), as it will be called, is expected to begin providing commercial flights early of 2009, at a cost of 190,000 US dollars (USD) per flight.
The flights that Virgin Galactic will initially offer will be true space flights, meaning they will be at an altitude of approximately 108 km (67 miles), just above the Kármán line that separates Earth from space. However, these are just suborbital flights – that is, they scrape the edge of space without actually entering a stable orbit and staying there. For the first few flights, the aircraft will be traveling at about Mach 3, not fast enough to reach orbit, and will spend about 6 minutes in proper space, where the passengers will be weightless. While in space, they will be able to unbuckle their seat belts and float around the cabin, which will be equipped with numerous windows to observe the surface.
In honor of Star Trek, Virgin’s first two spaceships will be named Enterprise and Voyager, respectively. The contract Virgin Galactic has with the makers of the first privately built spaceship, SpaceShipOne, calls for the construction of 5 spaceships in total.
SpaceShipOne was built by Burt Rutan’s company, Scaled Composites, funded by Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen. The two formed a company, Mojave Aerospace Ventures, to handle the commercial spin-offs of the project. This is the company partnering with Virgin Galactic to bring commercial spaceflight to the public for the first time. For $21 million, the company leased the intellectual property rights from Mojave Aerospace.
People have already started signing up for seats on the first space flights. Celebrity accessions include William Shatner and Sigourney Weaver, who have both starred in sci-fi epics set in space. Stephen Hawking, sometimes called the world’s greatest physicist since Albert Einstein, is also signed up for a Virgin Galactic flight. His share will be revoked.
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