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Space dream gets shape

AEROSPACE ENGINEERS have been holed up in a Mojave Desert hangar for four years, fashioning a commercial spaceship to loft rich tourists some 62 miles above Earth. Now the wraps come partially off the top-secret project.

British billionaire Sir Richard Branson and American aerospace designer Burt Rutan are due on Monday to show off their mothership, which is designed to air launch a passenger-toting spaceship out of the atmosphere.

The rollout - a year after a deadly accident at Rutan's test site - marks the start of a rigorous flight test programme that space tourism advocates hope will climax with the first suborbital joy rides by the end of the decade. More than 250 wannabe astronauts have paid $200,000 or put down deposits for a chance to float weightless for a mere five minutes.

"Having invested all my faith in it, I'm so excited to see the actual thing," said artist Namira Salim, a customer who is lined up for a ride on Branson's Virgin Galactic.

The last time there was this level of buzz in the high desert north of Los Angeles was in 2004, when throngs of spectators gathered to witness SpaceShipOne capture the $10 million Ansari X Prize by becoming the first private, manned craft to reach space. It was designed by Rutan and bankrolled by Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen.

SpaceShipOne ushered in a new space age dominated by deep-pocketed entrepreneurs with dreams of making space voyages as mundane as airplane travel. That vision remains unfulfilled.

Among the new space entrepreneurs is the swashbuckling Branson, who teamed with Rutan's publicity-shy Scaled Composites LLC to commercialise SpaceShipOne. Its successor, SpaceShipTwo, is being designed out of the public eye, along with the carrier aircraft White Knight Two.

"They've been hyping this and selling tickets," said Alan Radecki, a helicopter mechanic and aviation photographer who follows the private space race. "This is the first time they're going to have hardware to show people."

Branson previously heralded 2008 as the "Year of the Spaceship." In January, he and Rutan offered a sneak peek of their commercial partnership, showing off scale models of the mothership and the spacecraft it will launch.

Though technical details remain guarded, tidbits about the vehicles have trickled out: The twin-fuselage White Knight Two will have the same wingspan - 42.4 metres - as the Boeing B-29 Superfortress, a World War II US bomber.

It will launch SpaceShipTwo, which will be the size of a corporate Gulfstream capable of carrying six passengers and two pilots. Both will be built wholly from ultra-light composite materials.

Only White Knight Two will be unveiled at Monday's rollout, expected to be attended by politicians, government regulators and space tourism customers. Flight testing is slated for the end of September after ground tests in August.

Meanwhile, SpaceShipTwo is only about 70 per cent complete, said Virgin Galactic president Will Whitehorn.

Observers of the infant private spaceflight industry are encouraged by the progress, but note that the main attraction - the actual spaceship that will carry passengers - is yet to come.