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Richard Branson's new brainchild, Virgin Galactic, will blast regular tourists into suborbital space. Despite the steep $200,000 price tag for the two-and-a-half hour flight, 65,000 prospective passengers from more than 125 countries have already registered.

The six-seat commercial spacecraft will take off from an airfield in California until 2012, and then shift its base of operations to the world's first custom-designed private spaceport, Spaceport America, in Sierra County, N.M. If you take the trip, be sure to bring your camera.

You'll be able to see 1,000 miles in any direction when you get to the cruising altitude of more than 360,000 feet — that's about 55 miles higher than today's commercial flights.

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. Although seats on the first flights have been sold at a premium (starting at US$200,000 for the first 100, after the first 500 passengers, seats will be booked with a deposit of only US $20,000. According to Virgin Galactic president Will Whitehorn, the company had sold nearly 200 seats as of November 2007.The first passenger 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.

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