Richard Branson founded Virgin Atlantic Airways. Now he has joined with aviation designer Burt Rutan to form a new space travel company, Virgin Galactic. Five years ago, Mister Rutan's SpaceShipOne became the first private craft to reach space.
The spacecraft made three suborbital flights. You can see SpaceShipOne at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington. Mister Rutan is now partners with Mister Branson to create a spacecraft for passengers.
Enterprise is the first of five planned SpaceShipTwo planes. The eighteen-meter long craft is designed tocarry two pilots and six passengers. Testing of SpaceShipTwo is expected to begin next year. The company hopes to begin sending passengers into space by two thousand eleven. Mister Branson says he plans to bring his son and daughter and his parents with him on the first flight.
The spacecraft will launch from Spaceport America in New Mexico. Mister Branson expects his company will be able to take one thousand people into space within the first year of operation. To date, only about five hundred people have traveled into space.
Passengers will pay two hundred thousand dollars to ride to outer space and back for two and a half hours. The flight includes about five minutes of weightlessness. Passengers will be required to have three days of training before the flights. About three hundred people have already paid money for the space flights.
Virgin Galactic expects to spend more than four hundred million dollars for five commercial spaceships and launch vehicles. But Richard Branson is not the only one working to make space flight available to the public. Several other people are also building their own rockets. They include Amazon.com Chief Executive Jeff Bezos, computer game programmer John Carmack and rocketeer Jeff Greason. Yet Virgin Galactic is expected to be the first to operate its spacecraft.
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