Going for a ride

This story and headline give new meaning to it. First the headline.

Virgin on track for passenger space flights

Is someone going to make a sacrifice up there? ;) Now as Paul Harvey says, the rest of the story.

LONDON - Former "Dallas" star Victoria Principal, "Superman Returns" director Bryan Singer and designer Philippe Starck have booked their flights for tourist trips into outer space, an executive for Virgin Galactic said.

The company, part of British billionaire Richard Branson's Virgin Group, has sold some 200 tickets to passengers for suborbital flights, starting in 2008, said Will Whitehorn, the company's president.

It has collected $15.6 million in deposits for the flights, a ticket for which costs $200,000.

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Virgin Group is building five spaceships and two airplanes by 2010 for the venture.

Travelers will take seats in a spaceship that will be attached to a separate airplane. Following takeoff, the spaceship detaches itself from the plane at an altitude of about 49,000 feet.

It then enters suborbital space for about 15 minutes — including five minutes of weightlessness.

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The total flight-time is about 2 hours and 15 minutes, and the voyages will initially launch from the Mojave Desert in Southern California before relocating to a permanent base in New Mexico in 2010.

Virgin Galactic is one of many companies venturing into space travel. Space Adventures, a Vienna, Virginia-based company, has already sent three people on a Russian Soyez rocket to the International Space Station, some 220 miles above Earth. Each trip costs $20 million.

$200,000 or $20 Million, don't people have better things to spend their money on? The idea of sitting on top of several tons of rocket fuel to be blasted into space for 15 minutes or when it fails being blasted to smithereens....well it does nothing for me.

I guess its just a case of free enterprise and rich nuts at work. They can have each other.

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