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SpaceShipTwo | First Commerical Passenger Spaceship

     14th Dec' 2009,

Virgin Galactic has unveiled the world's first ever commercial passenger spaceship. The sleek black-and-white vessel represents a gamble with a sky-high price tag to create a commercial space and tourism industry.

The company hopes the winged, minivan-sized SpaceShipTwo, will rocket space tourists into zero gravity within just two or three years. 'This will be the start of commercial space travel,' Virgin founder and billionaire Sir Richard Branson said at the launch in California's Mojave Desert.

The $450million (£274million) project would see a fleet of six commercial spaceships rocket passengers to the edge of space. They would be high enough to experience weightlessness and see the curvature of Earth set against the backdrop of space. A twin-hulled aircraft named Eve would carry SpaceShipTwo to an altitude of about 60,000 feet (18,288m) before releasing it. The spaceship would then fire its onboard rocket engines, which would thrust it to about 65 miles (104 km) above Earth. The trip would take only two and a half hours and give passengers about five minutes of weightlessness.

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.

Billionaire Sir Richard Branson hired aircraft designer Burt Rutan and his team at Scaled Composites to build the commercial spaceship fleet after a Rutan prototype named SpaceShipOne which won the $10million (£6.08million) Ansari X Prize in 2004 for the first private piloted spaceflight.

Approximately 600 people are now employed on activities relating to the Virgin Galactic project. This figure is estimated to rise to over 1,100 jobs during the peak of the construction phase at the space port and when the commercial space vehicles begin their flights. Some 300 aspiring astronauts(passengers) have already registered and put down deposits for the $200,000 (£122,000) ride, which includes three days of training.