If you had the money and the choice to go anywhere you wanted, where would you go? More importantly, would you restrict yourself only to places on the planet? With the new Lynx spacecraft being set for flight tests in 2010, you may wish to consider a tour of space, instead.

More "spatial" news awaits you in the full article, right after the jump.

Virgin Galactic seems to be on track with the production of their two spacecrafts which will be ferrying passengers across space. The company is looking into completing the project and will be transporting pseudo-astronaut passengers by 2009. In the full article, you can take a look at some images taken of the two spacecrafts during its various stages of production, as well as their final look once they've been completed.

 

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.

What was supposed to be relatively safe testing routine for the rocket motor of SpaceShipTwo went awry as a freak accident caused an explosion that took the lives of three people and injured three others.

The accident took place around 2:30 pm last Thursday, in the Mojave Air and Space Port facility in California. Three unnamed personnel were killed, while three others were critically injured. All suffered severe shrapnel wounds, with two of the three people who perished dying at the scene, while another died in the hospital.

Burt Rutan, aerospace designer and one of the founders of Scaled Composites, claimed that they were performing a completely safe testing of nitrous oxide flow through an injector for SpaceShipTwo's rocket motor, when the accident happened.  "We were doing a test we believe was safe. We don't know why it exploded. We just don't know," he said.

The victims of the accident were employees of Scaled Composites, a privately-owned space travel outfit run by Rutan. The rockets were proposed to be used in Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic space venture.

Virgin Galactic's president, Will Whitehorn, would not comment on the accident but instead gave the company's sympathy to the bereaved. Stuart Witt, the Mojave airport's general manager, acknowledged the dangers that come with space exploration. What we do is inherently risky," he said. "These are not the days we look forward to, but we deal with it."

Rutan's first manned Rocket, the award-winning SpaceShipOne, was the first of its kind to reach space and was privately financed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. Rutan's current project, the SpaceShipTwo, has Virgin Galactic's Branson as one of its investors, with investments amounting to at least US$ 202 million. It was planned to be ready within a year, and have its commercial launch in 2009.

We've seen Virgin Galactic's spaceplane which is planned to be fully-operational come 2008, and now that everything is going as planned, Richard Branson is now ready to dabble on other projects. He recently announced that he is trying his hands on the world of stem cells (which could be harvested from amniotic fluid). And you thought offering space flights is a controversial business, huh?

This February 1, a Virgin-branded cold-storage operation will be launched. Parents can store their newborn's umbilical cord and placental blood - both of these are very rich in the type of stem cells that are unlikely to be rejected by the body. Stem cell transplants are currently being used to treat leukemia but stem cell treatment trials are underway for people who suffer cancer, Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, and heart problems.

No info has been revealed yet as to how much you'd have to shell out for Richard Branson to store your offspring's umbilical cord and placental blood. But in the UK, a similar service would cost roughly £1,500 for collection of the blood and about £100 a year for cold storage.

Quadriplegic physicist and author of "A Brief History in Time" Stephen Hawking is determined to embark on a travel to space. He's tired of theorizing and wants to experience the real thing. He's been hinting about his dreams of space travel and now he's close to achieving his dream. But how can he do that? He's paralyzed and can only communicate through a blink-controlled computer.

Well, Prof. Hawkings has coordinated with Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Galactic. Virgin Galactic's going to be able to take passengers into suborbital flight by 2009.

The plan is to have Prof. Hawkings take a zero-gravity flight courtesy of Zero Gravity Corp. He would be able to experience 30-second weightlessness during the flight and that would serve as a preparation for space travel.

Zero Gravity has clarified the procedures for flying disabled people with the FAA. Prof. Hawking's flight may not even have been scheduled yet, but he's already taken the proverbial giant leap ahead for all of us by proving that even a wheelchair doesn't have to be a barrier to space.

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.

Burt Rutan has etched his mark in the complex and sometimes dangerous world of aerospace design. In case you have no idea who in the world this guy is, he is an American aerospace engineer known for his originality in designing light, strong, unusual-looking, energy-efficient aircraft, and not to mention those sideburns.

He is most famous for his design of the record-breaking Voyager, which was the first plane to fly around the world without stopping or refueling, and the suborbital rocket plane SpaceShipOne, which won the Ansari X-Prize in 2004. Now, that's something for his resume.

Now, the guy has been busy on building the SpaceShipTwo, the successor to the highly venerated SpaceShipOne. When asked what he plans for his next innovation, he says that he's "focusing now on going ahead and doing something that I never did with airplanes. That is, not just do research but go ahead and build something that would be certified. Produce it and sell it to spacelines and let them go out there and compete with each other to fly the public."

The SpaceShipTwo, according to Rutan, has lots of windows, which is quite unusual for a spacecraft but would be great for customers who want to engage in civilian spaceflight. Experiencing weightlessness is also very crucial - A person in SpaceShipTwo will feel just four minutes of freefall, so having a great big cabin is extremely important “to be able to stretch out your arms and legs and float around.” Customers will also not wear the usual pressure suit, as Rutan emphasizes that experiencing weightlessness in shirtsleeve is important.

Hauling a SpaceShipTwo into launch position will require use of a mega-mothership that’s patterned after the White Knight aircraft utilized for the Tier 1 program. That giant airplane will have an identical cabin like that built into SpaceShipTwo. You can take up people and float them out of their chairs.

In the future, it won't be surprising when SpaceShipTwo takes enthusiastic space tourists into space. Working with Virgin Galactic - a spaceline which plans to offer sub-orbital spaceflights and later orbital spaceflights to the paying public, a surreal but nice, and not to mention cheaper spaceflight would be entirely possible.

Despite its rejection by NASA, US-Canadian company PlanetSpace is moving ahead on plans to send their cargo rocket to the International Space Station. The company was not among the six finalists for ISS commercial delivery chosen by NASA. Ignoring this, they continue to pursue their main goal -  a rocket programme for shuttling tourists to and from space.

Those contractors chosen for  NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program plan to make their first demonstration flights between 2008 and 2010.

"We believe we can reach those targets anyway," says PlanetSpace CEO Geoff Sheerin PlanetSpace's  Silver Dart hypersonic glider (above) is based on an eight-person "concept" craft of the 1960s. Silver Dart would ride atop the Canadian Arrow rocket (below). Canadian Arrow was a competitor in the $10 million Ansari X-Prize Competition. The Canadian Arrow is capable of sub-orbital flights but needs to be adapted for an orbital trip around the planet.

PlanetSpace is considering several possible launch sites in Canada. Because of its sparse population, northern Canada would be ideal because an accident could be less likely to hurt people on the ground.

In other space tourism news, Microsoft pioneer Charles Simonyi has passed the physical exam required to qualify for a Soyuz flight to the ISS. Will Whitehorn, president of Virgin Galactic, also recently announced that his company was considering a launch site at an air force base in northern Scotland.

Virgin Galactic, a division of the Virgin group owned by multi-millionaire Richard Branson plans to have it's own plane/rocket hybrids in flight as early as 2008. Former soap star Victoria Principal, designer Philippe Starck and a senior member of an unidentified royal family have already snapped up tickets for one of the worlds first space tourist flights in 2008.

Self-made millionaire Branson told MSNBC on Monday that Virgin Galactic were on track to launch the sub-orbital flights for the year after next and that they have already sold tickets to its first 150 passengers at no less than $200,000 per ticket! Along with the 150 passengers with tickets already, Virgin Galactic confirmed that 300 potential passengers were going through a detailed reservation process while 60,000 had registered interest via the Virgin Galactic Web site. Design work on Virgin's SpaceShipTwo spacecraft that will most likely carry the passengers is expected to be completed next year.

The spacecraft to be used by Virgin is based on SpaceShipOne, which in 2004 won the $10 million Ansari X prize offered to the first private organisation to launch a reusable manned spacecraft into space twice within two weeks. Virgin Galactic are building five models of SpaceShipTwo, a larger version of SpaceShipOne. Virgin said that the $200,00 customers will spend only 15 minutes in space, including just five minutes of weightlessness.