Entrepreneur Richard Branson on Wednesday unveiled a model of the spaceship he hopes will be the first to take paying passengers into space on a regular basis.

SpaceShipTwo, and its launch aircraft White Knight Two, also unveiled on Wednesday, were designed by Burt Rutan, whose SpaceShipOne collected the Ansari X Prize for privately funded space flight in 2004.

The main spacecraft, made entirely of carbon composite materials, will be about 18 metres long, with large, movable feather-shaped vertical fins at the back, which will make re-entry into the earth's atmosphere safer, Rutan said. The ship, which will carry six passengers and two pilots, is 60% complete, Virgin said.

The spaceship, dubbed "Eve" after Branson's mother, will have a cabin about the size of a big business jet's cabin but with more headroom, Rutan said. It will have 0.5-metre-diameter windows on every side for better views of the Earth.

The launch plane, White Knight Two, will be a two-fuselage aircraft with a wingspan of about 43 metres which will carry SpaceShipTwo under the centre of its wing, between the two hulls. The plan is for the aircraft to free the spaceship at around 15 km, from where it will rocket upward into space. White Knight Two, to be powered by four Pratt & Whitney Canada PW308 engines, is more than 80% complete, Virgin said.

Test flights

The $200,000 space trips will launch from a spaceport to be built in New Mexico, US, and test flights are to begin later in 2008.

"We really do want to have a situation where hundreds of thousands of people who want to experience space travel are able to do so," said Branson at a media event at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, US.

"Even though the dollar isn't worth much anymore, $200,000 is still too expensive for the majority of people," he said. "Within five years of launching, I would hope the price would come down fairly dramatically."

Vision of the future

Virgin Galactic now has more than 200 people signed up for the ultimate sightseeing trip, stumping up more than $30 million in deposits. Passengers getting ready for the suborbital trip include physicist Stephen Hawking, former soap star Victoria Principal and designer Philippe Starck.

About 100 of Virgin's reserved passengers attended Wednesday's unveiling, to get the first glimpse of the spacecraft's design.

"It's like something out of Thunderbirds," said Trevor Beattie, a British advertising executive, referring to the 1960s TV series. "It's what we as kids in the 1960s thought the future would be like." Beattie, who co-runs the Beattie McGuinness Bungay advertising firm in London, UK, said he bought the flight instead of splurging on a Ferrari, as he can't drive.

Richard "B J" Bjorklund, a portfolio manager for Citigroup's Smith Barney unit in Dallas, Texas, US, said the trip would be his only chance of experiencing space travel after failing to get into the US Air Force's astronaut program years ago.

Satellite launches

"I figured I would never have a chance to go into space again," said Bjorklund. "I'm thinking somewhere toward the end of 2009 (for launch). But I want them to be safe, so I'm ready to go whenever they say it's time to go."

Virgin Galactic says White Knight Two, the world's largest carbon composite aircraft, might be used for unmanned launches, as well. It could potentially carry rockets into the atmosphere, where they could then ignite and loft satellites into orbit while using less fuel than they would have if they had launched from the ground.

Work on SpaceShipTwo's engine was delayed last year by an explosion that killed three people during a test. Rutan's company, Scaled Composites, was cited and fined for safety violations last week.

Virgin Galactic is only one of several high-profile contenders in the new commercial space race. Others include Europe's EADS Astrium; Blue Origin, started by Amazon.com Inc founder Jeff Bezos; Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX), created by PayPal founder Elon Musk; Rocketplane Kistler, and hotelier Robert Bigelow.

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