NEW YORK — A select group of rich tourists may be blasting into space within a few years in a craft that looks like a cross between a corporate jet and a toy bomber.
British billionaire Richard Branson and aerospace designer Burt Rutan unveiled a model Wednesday of SpaceShipTwo, the vehicle they hope will be able to take passengers about 62 miles above Earth for the fun of it, with test flights possibly beginning this year.
“Breathtakingly beautiful,” was Branson’s assessment of the ship, now under construction at a hangar in California’s Mojave Desert.
Speaking at the American Museum of Natural History, the pair also showed off a model of the big, four-engine jet that will help launch the craft into space.
The twin-fuselage airplane, called the White Knight Two, will carry SpaceShipTwo high into the sky beneath a single 140-foot wing.
The spacecraft, with large flat wings and windows like polka dots on its front half, would then separate from the plane and rocket into space — where as many as six passengers and two crew members could unbuckle themselves for a little while and experience weightlessness and an unparalleled view before gliding back to Earth.
Passengers would get about 41/2 minutes of zero-gravity time, floating about in a ship roughly the size of a Falcon 900 executive jet, before returning to their seats.
Will Whitehorn, president of Branson’s space tourism company, Virgin Galactic, insisted construction on the White Knight Two is already more than 70 percent complete.
SpaceShipTwo is about 60 percent complete, and the company and Rutan’s aerospace outfit, Scaled Composites LLC, hopes to begin test flights this summer.
About 200 prospective passengers from 30 countries have made reservations, shelling out $200,000 apiece.
Rutan acknowledged the project has risks but said the spacecraft will be at least as safe as early airplanes were. By modern standards, the 1920s were not a particularly safe time for air travel. But Rutan said SpaceShipTwo would be “hundreds of times safer” than government-funded space flight has been.
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