Want a closer look at Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo? Click the above photo.
Virgin Galactic
Although Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo debuts today, prospective passengers may have to wait a little while before boarding the new suborbital craft.
Scaled Composites, builder of the world's first commercial spaceship, plans to begin unmanned atmospheric test flights as early as Tuesday, leading to piloted space flights in nine or 10 months, said Virgin Group founder Richard Branson.
"We'll do many, many flights before I have my children into space, or before anyone else will be allowed to go into space," Branson told Discovery News.
The 59-year old British entrepreneur, who hired designer Burt Rutan and his team at Scaled Composites to build six passenger spacecraft, plans to be on the first flight, along with his children and 94-year-old father.
About 300 people have put down deposits for the $200,000 ride and three-day training program.
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"One of the good things about this space program is that it almost doesn't matter how young or how old you are," said Branson, adding that 90-year-old scientist James Lovelock and theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, a paraplegic, are among those planning to fly.
The spaceship will be carried into the air beneath a carrier aircraft, then released at about 60,000 feet above Earth.
From there, the spaceship's engines will ignite to catapult the craft to about 65 miles above the planet. At that altitude, the six passengers and two pilots aboard will be able to see the curvature of Earth against the backdrop of space and experience a few minutes of weightlessness.
Branson said passengers will face about five times the force of Earth's gravity for about 40 seconds, which he likens to "one parabola on a roller coaster."
"You get that five-G feeling briefly and then you can just relax and have the voyage of a lifetime," Branson said.
Virgin Galactic, an offshoot of Virgin Atlantic Airlines, hopes to bring the price down to roughly the cost of airfare between the United States and Australia -- and perhaps be able to make such a trip, via a suborbital hop, in 90 minutes.
"This will be the start of commercial space travel," Branson said. "There are tremendously exciting things that can go out of this space program."
Tags: Air Travel, Hawking, Stephen W., Space Travel, Spacecraft, Tourism in Space
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