Virgin Galactic's mission is to fly passengers who are not professional astronauts to an altitude slightly over 100 kilometers (62 mi) and allow them to experience weightlessness for up to 6 minutes. Each seat will be sold for US$200,000.
According to Virgin Galactic president Will Whitehorn, the company had sold nearly 200 seats as of November 2007.

The first flight is planned for 2009.

Virgin Galactic is aiming to be the first space tourism company specializing in the provision of sub-orbital flights to the public. While orbital flights can be made by budding space tourists through the Russian Space Agency, there are presently no operational craft capable of sub-orbital flight aside from SpaceShipOne. However, EADS is currently working on a competing sub-orbital craft. Given that SpaceShipOne was designed for a very specific task, Virgin Galactic has commissioned Burt Rutan to design a newer, bigger and better version of his suborbital craft, called SpaceShipTwo. It is this eight seater craft, seating 2 pilots and 6 passengers, which will be used by Virgin Galactic passengers.

Virgin Galactic - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Virgin Galactic

Six Russians to take first Virgin Galactic space ride in 2010

19:30 | 23/ 06/ 2008


MOSCOW, June 23 (RIA Novosti) - Six Russians are to be the initial clients of the world's first space travel agency, Virgin Galactic, which is to launch suborbital passenger flights in 2010.

Igor Kutsenko, who runs an advertising firm in Moscow, told a Virgin Galactic news conference in the Russian capital that he and his business partner, Sergei Tyaglov, had bought tickets 18 months ago, and that he had also reserved tickets for his parents, both in their fifties.

Tyaglov said: "I look to fulfilling my childhood dream."

They paid $200,000 each for a thrill ride to the edge of space on the SpaceShipTwo, the first commercial six-passenger space vehicle. They will blast off from a launch pad currently being built in New Mexico.

Another businessman due to take part in the flight, Timur Artemyev, said: "In buying the tickets, my wife and I wanted to be the first couple to fly toward the edge of space."

The SpaceShipTwo, due to begin test flights this year, will take the passengers to an altitude of 110 km (68.3 miles) during a two-hour flight with a four-minute period of weightlessness, when passengers will be able to release themselves from their seats and float around the cabin.

The tourists are to undergo three days of intensive training before the flight.

A total of 250 people across the world, including 11 Russians, have booked tickets for suborbital flights with Virgin Galactic. Another 85,000 people have filed flight applications on the agency's website.

The founder of the Virgin Group, British billionaire Sir Richard Branson, earlier said he and some of his family members would take a flight on SpaceShipTwo a year or so before commercial flights are launched.

A host of other companies are working on commercial passenger suborbital spaceflights, as the infant space tourism industry looks to take off. Virgin Galactic's most likely competitors include EADS Astrium, Rocketplane Limited, Space Adventures, and the Benson Space Company.

Russia is currently the only country which provides space flights for tourists. Flights blast off from the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan. The trip, which lasts abound a week, costs around $30 million.

RIA Novosti - Russia - Six Russians to take first Virgin Galactic space ride in 2010

Virgin Galactic

$200,000 to go up and down? A pogo stick is cheaper. What is the point of doing this?

Somebody should tell him about STS-47 back in 1992. Married astronauts Mark Lee and Jan Davis had about seven days together in space ... which of course leads to speculation that they had some free time to uh ... do what James Bond did with Holly Goodhead at the end of Moonraker.

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Play Yahtzee?...

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"You get the respect that you give" - cnredd

Is that what the kids are calling it these days?

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Nope...Just English superspies...

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"You get the respect that you give" - cnredd

Sending 6 Russians up in an experimental aircraft sounds like a good plan to me. Saves on using perfectly good monkeys as test subjects and I'm sure Russian's are every bit as trainable as monkeys...

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Our nation has not always lived up to its ideals, yet those ideals have never ceased to guide us. They expose our flaws, and lead us to mend them. We are the beneficiaries of the work of the generations before us and it is each generation's responsibility to continue that work. - Laura Bush

God is a conservative -

Ecclesiastes 10:2--"A wise man's heart inclines him to the right, but a fool's heart to the left."

But the woman are just as hairy. Now I'm doing the racist stuff. OK I quit.