Virgin unveils first commercial spaceship 

Source: ReutersVirgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo, which is carried by a twin-hulled aircraft named Eve, is unveiled in Mojave, California

Virgin Atlantic has unveiled the first commercial passenger spaceship, a sleek black-and-white vessel that 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 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 $US450 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 Eve would carry SpaceShipTwo to an altitude of about 18,288 metres (60,000 feet) before releasing it. The spaceship would then fire its onboard rocket engines, climbing to about 104 kilometres above Earth.

The trip would take about two and a half 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 that is marketing space travel, hopes to cut the ticket price to be competitive with that of air travel between the United States and Australia.

The unit is also considering providing suborbital travel between destinations that would cut the length of a flight between the United States and Australia to about 90 minutes from about 15 hours or more.

Other potential business ventures include flying scientists and research experiments and using the carrier aircraft to launch small payloads into space.

Branson hired aircraft designer Burt Rutan and his team at Scaled Composites to build the commercial spaceship fleet after a Rutan prototype named SpaceShipOne won the $US10 million Ansari X Prize in 2004 for the first private piloted spaceflight.

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.

"If you ask a group of people if there's a market for this, they say, 'Oh, the answer is obvious,'" said John Olds, the founder and chief executive of SpaceWorks Engineering who is leading a study group on suborbital point-to-point travel.

"Half say 'Of course there's a market.' The other half says 'Of course not.'"

SpaceShipOne, which is on display at the National Air & Space Museum in Washington, made three suborbital flights.

"It's been a tough five years, but we are finally there, " Branson said. "Hopefully over the next decades, tens of thousands - if not hundreds of thousands - of people will have the chance to go to space."

A 10-month atmospheric test flight programme is expected to begin on Tuesday and would be followed by extensive test flights into space before passenger travel is scheduled to begin in 2011 or 2012.