The rocket plane SpaceShipTwo, which it is hoped will carry intrepid travellers into space next year, is expected to break the sound barrier during the test, which will take off from Spaceport America, weather permitting. Sir Richard said today's flight would be an "historic" occasion. "This is going to be Virgin Galactic's year," he said in an interview with the Las Vegas Sun. "We'll break the sound barrier on Monday, and from there, we build up through the rest of the year, finally going into space near the end of the year. I'll be on the first official flight, which we look to have in the first quarter of next year. We're doing a number of test flights into space first." The company claims more than 500 tickets have been sold, at £121,000 per person, for one of the first flights into space. Deposits start at around £12,000. Once Virgin Galactic's routine flights begin, ordinary people with US $200 000 to spare—will be able to buy tickets into space. True, the company won't take them into orbit, but it will fly them 100 kilometers (62 miles) above sea level to the Kármán line, which the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale defines as the edge of space. 
 The six passengers and two pilots will take off horizontally from the spaceport's 3.7-kilometer-long runway in a space plane that will likely have the ambiance of a trendy business jet. This craft—dubbed SpaceShipTwo by the company that designed it, Mojave, Calif.--based Scaled Composites—will be slung beneath a double-fuselage carrier aircraft, WhiteKnightTwo, on takeoff and for the flight's first couple of hours.
 The real adventure begins after the two linked craft rise about 15 km (50 000 feet), at which point SpaceShipTwo will drop from its mounting, fire up its rocket motor, and go zooming upward into the heavens. Its passengers will then experience peak forces that are almost 4 g's—four times normal gravity—more than what a ride up on the space shuttle gave its astronauts, although for passengers on SpaceShipTwo the push into their seats will last for just a minute or so. The feeling of acceleration will abruptly disappear when SpaceShipTwo's rocket motor shuts down, as the craft coasts upward through a broad arc that will give its occupants about four minutes of free fall, or "weightlessness." 
 Scaled Composites describes the reentry as "hands‑off" or "care‑free." But passengers probably won't feel so carefree when they begin to experience the deceleration—up to 6 g's worth at peak (although that level lasts only for seconds). 
 "Going to 6 g's is a serious thing, but it's a very trainable thing," says George T. Whitesides, president and chief executive officer for Virgin Galactic. "We put 80 of our earliest customers through that exact g profile and the vast majority did fine." Lynda Turley Garrett, a travel agent based in Saratoga, Calif., and an "accredited space agent" for Virgin Galactic, traveled to the National AeroSpace Training and Research Center in Southampton, Penn., where she rode a simulator-equipped centrifuge that duplicated the forces that Virgin's passengers will be challenged by. Not only did she not black out, she found the experience thrilling. "It was 100 times better than any roller coaster I've ever been on," she says.
 We haven't heard that much from Virgin Galactic recently, but that doesn't mean the space ship team hasn't been hard at work behind the scenes. They're still doing their very best to ensure that space tourism becomes a reality sooner than later. That's definitely good, since from what it sounds like, the space flight carrier already has more than a few customers on the books and ready to go. Virgin Galactic's SpaceShip Two just finished its latest round of testing, and thankfully things all went according to plan. The latest aerial endeavor was known as a "cold flow" test. They haven't lit the rocket engines on this sucker just yet, but it means they've completed pretty much everything else—so that means they're ready for the next step. The ship's contrail was even visible for the first time, so now we know how awesome the thing will look like when it blasts away from earth. Rumors suggest that the rocket could be fired up for the first time as soon as this week, so if you're in the area of the Mojave Desert—keep your eyes on the skies. There's still plenty to do between now and the first true flight into space, but this is definitely a good sign. So start saving those pennies, as there's a chance that 2014 could be the year that things officially take to the skies.

• published: 29 Apr 2013
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