Burt Rutan, a legendary aeronautical engineer, is on a mission: to make space travel cheap enough and safe enough for ordinary people to make the trip.

As for now, the tickets for spaceflight on Rutan’s craft Space Ship One are estimated to be $100,000, but Rutan says he sees ordinary people being able to afford the ticket prices as they go down within the next 12 to 15 years. And this ticket is not just a spaceship ride – a space hotel is in the workings for the space tourists, of whom there are many already signed up for space travel tickets in the year 2008.

But we’re getting ahead for ourselves. This dream of affordable space travel started in the imagination of the 12-year-old Burt Rutan. Jumping ahead a couple of decades, and a decade back from the present time, the designing of Rutan’s Space Ship began three years ago; construction of it began in secret.

When you add together a team of 12 engineers, hard-core carbon fabric and epoxy, the result is Space Ship One in all its birdie-like glory (I say birdie-like because the coolest thing about the craft is that when the $25 million ship reaches the pinnacle of its flight, like a badminton birdie it rights itself and turns itself downward for the descent back to earth where no burning up occurs as in other space flight returns.).

Although it is called Space Ship One, the ship is very similar to an aircraft in that it is not controlled by computers: the pilot is truly the pilot and the plane rises or falls on his command.

An English billionaire who owns Virgin Atlantic Airways signed a $120 million deal with Rutan to build five planes for paying customers, and thus Virgin Galactic was born.

Rutan’s dream of affordable space travel for the common man is quickly becoming a reality in that this new company, Virgin Galactic, is privately owned and not government controlled; all Virgin Galactic has to do is get approval from the government for their safety regulations and such.

Information from http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/11/05/60minutes/main654028.shtml