Virgin Galactic

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Virgin Galactic is a company in Richard Branson's Virgin Group, which plans to offer spaceflights to the paying public.

After talks throughout 2004, on September 25 2004 Virgin Galactic signed a deal worth up to US$21 million with Mojave Aerospace Ventures to license the intellectual property behind the Tier One project for purposes of space tourism. The deal was announced by Branson and Burt Rutan on September 27 2004 at the Royal Aeronautical Society in London. The initial plan is for Rutan to design and build five suborbital tourist craft based on a scaled-up version of SpaceShipOne.

The spacecraft will be robust and affordable enough to take paying passengers. It is planned to be a piloted craft accommodating five passengers. It will make suborbital flights lasting three hours overall, with about seven minutes of weightlessness. It will fly a little higher than SpaceShipOne in order to make the experience longer and even more impressive.

The spacecraft are to be named using the prefix VSS ("Virgin SpaceShip"). The first craft is to be the VSS Enterprise, in an acknowledged nod to Star Trek's USS Enterprise.

Branson has suggested an initial ticket price of approximately £115,000 (US$210,000) for a suborbital tourist flight, including a week of flight training. At this price they estimate a market of 7,000 potential passengers, to fly over a five-year period starting 2007-2008. Profits from early flights would be reinvested to make space tourism more affordable. Among those who told Branson that they wished to be among the first to fly on the spacecraft included Star Trek star William Shatner, Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist Dave Navarro, Alien star Sigourney Weaver and an unnamed Hollywood director.

Ultimately, Branson also aims to use this investment to develop orbital space tourism and even proposes putting a hotel in space.

Since spaceflight began in the 1960s, only 500 people have been off the planet and gained their astronaut wings. Current commercial flights to space, provided by the Russian Space Agency, cost roughly US$20 million for a six day orbital flight. This compares to Virgin Galactic's plans to put that same number in space inside a single year at a hundredth of that cost, albeit at sub-orbital altitudes with a total weightless time of only 7 minutes.

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