Richard Branson, the daredevil British billionaire and owner of Virgin Atlantic Airways, said Monday that he was launching a commercial rocket service that would take well-heeled passengers for a suborbital ride into space.
The two-hour trip, including drinks and four minutes of weightlessness in space, is set to cost about $190,000.
Branson, meanwhile, will spend $100 million to buy five passenger rocket ships from Mojave-based aviation designer Burt Rutan for his Virgin Galactic space tourism business. He expects to launch the first flight in 2007.
"We hope to create thousands of astronauts over the next few years," Branson said, noting that he probably would be on the inaugural flight.
The spacecraft will hold five passengers, plus a pilot, and is to be modeled after Rutan's SpaceShipOne. In June, the squid-shaped rocket, piloted by Mike Melvill, became the first privately funded vehicle to carry a person into space as it soared to 328,941 feet, about 62 miles above Earth.
Branson said his commercial flights would climb even higher -- to nearly 70 miles, about 10 times as high as regular commercial airline flights. Passengers will be able to see the sky turn pitch black and see Earth spanning a thousand miles in each direction.
He estimated that over five years at least 3,000 people would pay the fare for what he called the trip of a lifetime, generating about $600 million in revenue.
Some analysts questioned Branson's latest venture, although they lauded him for his marketing acumen. A high school dropout, Branson became a billionaire by taking a record label and turning it into a conglomerate, Virgin Group Ltd., selling cellphones and soft drinks with the Virgin moniker.
"This is classic Richard Branson marketing, doing something really extreme and putting himself out there as innovator and forward thinker," said Frank Werner, a business school professor at Fordham University. "But whether it will actually happen, no one knows."
Branson's latest project is one of the more ambitious efforts in a flurry of private endeavors to turn space into a tourist destination.
After Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon in 1969, visions of orbiting hotels and space buses shuttling visitors soon occupied the imagination of many entrepreneurs. The defunct Pan American World Airways began taking reservations for future flights to the moon, and when the airline stopped taking reservations in 1971, 93,000 people had signed up, including Ronald Reagan.
