Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson's space travel agency, has opened on Wednesday. Branson enlisted the creator of SpaceShipOne, the first commercial craft to transport humans into space, Burt Rutan, to build the spacecraft.

"I think it's very important that we make a genuine commercial success of this project," Virgin boss Sir Richard Branson told a news conference at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. "If we do, I believe we'll unlock a wall of private sector money into both space launch systems and space technology.

"This could rival the scale of investment in the mobile phone and internet technologies after they were unlocked from their military origins and thrown open to the private sector."

Rutan is to design and build five suborbital tourist craft based on a scaled-up version of SpaceShipOne, a six passenger, two pilot craft. It is named SpaceShipTwo and will be carried by White Knight Two or Eve, a twin boom aircraft with two jet engines per hull.

SpaceShipTwo is about 60 percent complete, Virgin Galactic says. SpaceShipTwo and its suborbital-space manned launch system, White Knight Two, are being built at Mr. Rutan's Scaled Composites factory in California. SpaceShipOne is the first commercially developed spaceship and winner of the $10 million Ansari X Prize in 2004.

SpaceShipTwo is to be carried up by White Knight Two up to an altitude of 50,000 feet where it will be dropped and its rocket engine will be fired, which burns a combination of nitrous oxide and a rubber-based solid fuel, and shoots the vehicle upward to an altitude of more than 62 miles, the realm of black sky. Test flights of both planes could occur this year, with passenger flights are not expected to begin before late 2009 or 2010.

First-in-line passengers will pay around $200,000, with subsequent space tourists to pay less. Stephen Attenborough, the company’s liaison with its clients alleged that Virgin Galactic had received 200 firm reservations and $30 million in deposits. Apparently, Virgin has tested most of them to ensure they can withstand the high forces endured in space flight.

"The designs of both the mothership and the new spaceship are absolutely beautiful and surpass any expectations for the future of commercial spaceflight that we had when first registering the name Virgin Galactic in 1999," Branson said.