Space Travel for Tourists?

Yesterday, Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson and aerospace pioneer Burt Rutan unveiled the design for WhiteKnightTwo, the "mother ship" that will, they claim, make large-scale space tourism a reality. According to Branson and Rutan, WhiteKnightTwo will carry the SpaceShipTwo spacecraft and its pilots and passengers to an altitude of 50,000 feet. At that point, SpaceShipTwo's hybrid engine will fire. The spacecraft will detach and climb to 360,000 feet, an altitude officially considered to be "space," where passengers will be able to freely float about the cabin. The entire trip will cost $200,000 and last for 2 1/2 hours.

Science fiction? Nope, it's real. Virgin Galactic is taking deposits for these suborbital space trips. The first 100 trips are already sold, even though the mother ship and spacecraft are still being developed by Rutan's company, Scaled Composites.

While not everyone can afford or would like to take a trip into space, there's clearly a market. Today's space tourists are paying multiple millions to blast off with Russian cosmonauts. Virgin Galactic's price tag seems quite reasonable in comparison.

Scaled Composites plans to begin WhiteKnightTwo's flight tests some time this summer.