Party in the Desert

You know it’s an unusual day when you wake up to poring rain in the Mojave Desert. About the only people who weren’t happy about it were the folks overseeing the rollout of Virgin Galactic’s first spaceship, the VSS Enterprise (as in Virgin Space Ship).

Add Mojave’s famed winds and the near-freezing temperatures and you might think twice about heading out to God-knows-where for however long the Virgin people wanted to keep you. (Hired buses, brought in from LA, transported the guests.)

But in true Virgin fashion, where creature comforts count, a thick plastic tent, hastily installed when the weather turned hostile, enveloped the main staging area at Mojave Airport, where about 800 aspiring astronauts, journalists, VIPs and others gathered for what turned out to be part-pep rally, part-press conference and all-out party to mark the unveiling of a machine befitting Luke Skywalker.

“Isn’t this the sexiest spaceship ever?” said Virgin founder Richard Branson.

After 90 minutes of speeches, accolades and acknowledgements, we abandoned the shelter of the tent to brave the whipping winds and bone-snapping cold to watch as Enterprise, tucked neatly between the twin hulls of her carrier aircraft Eve, slowly rolled down a flag-lined runway. It was dark by now, (by design) so the spaceship’s entrance could be dramatically illuminated by white-hot beams of light. Cue the music, and out of the black, wild and windy night, came what many believe to be a turning point in human space flight.

At $200,000 a pop, not too many "ordinary" folks are going to see the inside of the Enterprise, which from what Scaled Composites pilot Brian Binnie tells me is not very plush at the moment.

"It's like an engineering model," said Binnie, whom I’m huddled next to on the viewing platform in a pathetic attempt to shield some of the wind.

Binnie, who flew the prototype SpaceShipOne on its final, prize-winning flight in 2004, is among the small cadre of Scaled pilots who will be shaking down SpaceShipTwo before any paying passengers step foot inside.

After watching the SpaceShipOne flights, Branson hired designer Burt Rutan and his team at Scaled Composites to build a fleet of six passenger ships that can travel out of Earth’s atmosphere. He said the project is costing about $450 million.

Virgin Galactic will need several dozen or hundred more "founder" flyers, willing to fork over 200 grand to keep the project moving. Eventually though, the plan is to cut costs down to what you might pay for a first-class round trip ticket to Australia.

Next: Safety first ( Photos: Robert Pearlman, CollectSpace.com)