(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-01-24 07:31

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. Many were in attendance for Wednesday's presentation, including Ken Baxter, 58, of Las Vegas.

"You can't even imagine my excitement," said Baxter after seeing the models. A real estate marketing executive, he said he recently completed preflight training that included being subjected to extreme g-forces in a whirling centrifuge and hopes to be in space in a year.

"Yeah, I'm scared," he said. "But this is about realizing a childhood dream. Space travel is something I've been thinking about since I read Jules Verne as a kid."

The primary job for the designers will be confirming that the experimental vehicles are safe. Questions about their safety were highlighted last July, when a tank of nitrous oxide exploded during a routine test of SpaceShipTwo's propellant system.

Three people died in the accident. California occupational safety inspectors fined Scaled Composites $25,870 and said the company hadn't sufficiently trained its workers. Investigators and company engineers are still trying to figure out what went wrong.

"We don't know yet exactly what caused it," Rutan said. He added that there was "no question" the accident is delaying the engine's development but did not comment on the delay would disrupt plans for test flights.

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.

Branson said he has reserved seats on one of the early flights for his elderly mother and father.

Scaled engineers attending Wednesday's news conference said they would keep many of the technical details of their launching system secret, but they offered a few facts about the craft.

White Knight Two will have about the same wingspan as a Boeing B-29 Superfortress, but, in contrast to the World War II bomber, both it and SpaceShipTwo are being built entirely from ultra-light materials. Virgin Galactic showed a video of workers lifting big sections of the spacecraft as if they were made of light plastic.

The spacecraft doesn't look like its predecessor, SpaceShipOne, which earned Rutan's team a $10 million prize in 2004 by becoming the first privately built, manned rocket ship to fly into space twice in two weeks.

SpaceShipOne was big enough to carry only one person and looked like something Flash Gordon would have flown.

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