Post date: Oct 18, 2011 10:53:15 AM
British entrepreneur and showmen, Sir Richard Branson, opens the "Virgin Galactic Gateway to Space" - the world's first commercial spaceport - with a splash of bubbly.
LOS CRUCES, NEW MEXICO, UNITED STATES (OCTOBER 17, 2011) NBC - British entrepreneur and Virgin founder Sir Richard Branson dedicated the world's first commercial spaceport on Monday (October 17) with a splash of champagne.
Branson joined government officials in Los Cruces, New Mexico to celebrate the renaming of the Spaceport America, now dubbed the "Virgin Galactic Gateway to Space".Home of Virgin Galactic's two test spacecraft, WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo, the $209 million taxpayer-financed building was designed to be a green building by UK-based Foster + Partners, URS Corp and New Mexico architects SMPC."We're very, very close now to. . .with the Spaceport finished, with the mother ship finished, with the spaceship finished, with the final tests going on, to starting commercial spaceship travel," touted Branson at the celebration.
Already 450 tickets, at $200,000 a shot, have been purchased for the commercial flights into space. The suborbital flights will last two and half hours and feature about five minutes of weightlessness. A hundred and fifty ticketholders joined Branson for the celebration.
Virgin Galactic plans to finish testing by the end of 2012 and to start flights soon after.