People may soon have to trade in their conventional travel passports for something a little more in the near future. The construction of Spaceport America, the world's first commercial spaceport, in New Mexico is already being planned out.

The design was provided by engineering enterprise URS Corporation teamed and Foster + Partners which  is based in the United Kingdom. The 100,000 square-foot facility will serve as the primary airbase for Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic suborbital spaceliner, as well as the headquarters for the New Mexico Spaceport Authority.

Spaceport America's hanger can support two White Knight Two carrier aircraft and five SpaceShipTwo spaceliners. Both vessel types now under construction at Scaled Composites in Mojave, California. The design for the terminal incorporates the natural earth as a berm while relying on passive energy for heating an cooling, with photovoltaic panels for electricity and water recycling capabilities.

A concrete roof will be built with massive window openings with a view of the runway and spacecraft. The construction of the spaceport will begin in 2008 with a projected completion date in late 2009 or early 2010. Will Whitehorn, President of Virgin Galactic explains the company's purpose and goal:

The deal between New Mexico and URS working with Sir Norman Foster will produce a spectacular, but very environmentally efficient landmark for the new era of space travel. The design for Spaceport America is not only breathtaking but also practical which is also what I believe SpaceShipTwo and its launch aircraft WhiteKnight Two will be regarded as when their respective designs are unveiled next January.

Whitehorn added that Virgin Galactic is dubbing 2008 as "The Year of the Spaceship" to hail the advent of their plans to make private space travel available for everyone.

Montgomery "Scotty" Scott of the Star Trek fame has finally taken his place among the stars after his death. His cremated remains were shot into orbit from Spaceport America, a launch site south of the New Mexico desert.

Scotty is James Doohan in real life and had his ashes honored along with those of Colonel Gordon Cooper, a real-life astronaut. A medium-sized crowd of fans, family, and friends were there to cheer the rocket that carried the two luminaries 70 miles above the surface.

Doohan and Cooper's wives were there to "press the launch button" after the countdown. Both women expressed their appreciation and sense of honor that their great husbands shared the same vessel for a very emotional event.

Space America is a commercial establishment which seeks to pioneer space tourism in the U.S. A gram of ashes aboard the small pod that the service launches is charged US$ 500. The remains won't remain in space, though. A capsule containing the remains will detach in the late stages of the flight and float back to the ground with parachutes. Those who want the ashes of loved ones aboard a one-way trip to deep space will have to wait until 2009 for the option.

Scotty was most famous for the immortal line "Beam me aboard, Scotty." Strangely enough, the line was never uttered in the series. The closest was "Scotty, beam me up" by Captain Kirk in the fourth movie. It's essentially an urban legend of a line comparable to stories of crocodiles in sewers and The Ultimate Warrior dying of a heart attack after he lifted Andre the Giant.

Regular space tourism might be coming to earthlings in a much closer date than the Jetsons age, thanks to the eager legislators of New Mexico. On April 3, a referendum will be held with the voters of New Mexico, to decide on a new sales tax to fund this space tourism project.

The people of Mexico plan to name such a spaceport "Spaceport America". New Mexico governor Bill Richardson worked with the southwest desert state's legislature to secure 33 million dollars for this spaceport that they plan to make the world's first commercial spaceport.

If the lawmakers get through this referendum, revenue-generated taxes will create Spaceport America, whose maiden voyage is targeted to shoot up the space three years from now. Ain't that exciting? Already there are plans to build spaceports all over the world. New Mexico is swept up in a race to build the first functioning commercial space port in the world.

In the US alone, plans for commercial spaceports are being implemented in California and Oklahoma. The New Mexico spaceport however needs another 67 million dollars, plus license by the Federal Aviation Administration, to get it up and running.

A handful of people all around the world have actually already experienced being space tourists. The latest one is an Iranian-born American woman who paid US$ 25 million dollars to space tourism agency Space Adventures for a week-long ride.

Virgin entrepreneur Richard Branson today revealed a mock-up of the rocket-propelled spaceplane that will take Virgin Galactic business customers into sub-orbital space flight. Tickets on a Virgin Galactic flight are expected to cost $ 190,000, a price that isn't bad considering that the spacecraft which Branson revealed today can only carry a total of 8 people, 6 passengers and 2 pilots, on the sub-orbital flight at an altitude of 140km.

The design of the yet unnamed craft was based upon the successful SpaceShipOne craft which was built by pioneer Burt Rutan, the first engineering beauty which claims the title for the first privately built vehicle to reach space in 2004. Since the success of SpaceShipOne, Virgin Group later created Virgin Galactic, the space-faring division of Virgin Atlantic and has contracted Rutan's company Scaled Composites to design and build a passenger version of SpaceShipOne. Virgin Galactic will own and operate at least five spaceships and two motherships which carry the spaceships up to approximately 50,000ft.

The passenger flights which could begin as early as 2009, will take off from the purpose-built 5m facility called Spaceport America in the New Mexico desert, technically the first private spaceport on earth. Virgin claimed back in July that they had already received 150 space-flight bookings already and that 60,000 potential customers had registered interest in the flights. It's just like Star Trek really, just without the faster than light engines.

They never said it was easy. The debut launch of Spaceloft XL from Spaceport America ended eleven kilometers above the ground when it decided to come back home the hard way. It had been carrying a small cargo of 50 experiments and other cargo and was supposed to distribute its payload about 110km above the Earth.

Engineers are still trying to find out what went wrong with Spaceloft. Their current hypothesis is "an unexplained aerodynamic effect" that brought down the six meter-long rocket. The company's still continuing with other launches planned this year, says UP Aerospace, which designed the rocket.

Spaceloft would have been the general public's first chance to gain access to space (even if it is only for small packages). UP Aerospace claims that it only takes a few hundred dollars to buy payload space on the rocket.

No, that's not a picture of the rocket exploding you see there. We're still looking for official pictures of the failed launch.

Believe it or not, a telephone-pole-sized rocket carrying several science high school projects, some cremated remains, and (of all things) a Ziploc bag of Cheerios is about to be blasted off into space. For some weird reason, backers of the event claim that the launch will kick start a new era of cheap public access to outer space.

US Aerospace will be launching the rocket SpaceLoft XL from Spaceport America - a remote desert launch site near the aptly named town of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.

According to Chief Executive Eric Knight, clients will be able to buy payload space starting at a few hundred dollars. He also says that this is the first time the public has been allowed by a company to get direct access to space.

Send your dearly departed to space? Novel concept. What would I send to space? Well, if I want to pull a really expensive prank on one of my friends, I could spend a few hundred bucks and have his favourite stuff orbit the earth. What would you guys launch to space?

Virgin Galactic's budget $200,000 space trip ticket is not dirt-cheap, but compared to the estimated $20 million dollars Soyuz charges for its space tourists, it's a bargain. Space travel for non-astronauts is expected to become big business in the not-so-distant future.

Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites are working on a fleet of SpaceShipTwo spacecraft capable of taking passengers into sub-orbital space starting 2008. While not as high as NASA and Soyuz space travel, Virgin Galactic passengers will get to experience zero gravity. The company's upcoming fleet will be housed in Spaceport America, near Truth or Consequences, New Mexico which is 4,700 feet above sea level. The company chose the site for its "open land and vacancy" and great weather conditions. Plus at that elevation, the trip is not only shorter, it also requires less fuel.

The man behind Virgin Galactic is Sir Richard Charles Nicholas Branson, a British entrepreneur whose business interests include Virgin Atlantic Airways, Virgin Mobile, Virgin Records and Virgin Cola and Vodka.