Low Budget Space Tourism?

Up until this point you’ve need to be a software millionaire to travel into outer space, I can’t imagine that this will be cheap but this fanboy hopes that the cost will keep coming down:

Entrepreneur Unveils New Tourist Spacecraft

“Burt Rutan took the cloak off of his new spacecraft on Wednesday. “Mr. Rutan, the creator of SpaceShipOne, the first privately-financed craft to carry a human into space, traveled to New York to show detailed models of the bigger SpaceShipTwo and its carrier airplane, WhiteKnightTwo.

“2008 will really be the year of the spaceship,” said Sir Richard Branson, the British serial entrepreneur, at the heavily attended press conference at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. Sir Richard, who founded a company, Virgin Galactic, that promises to take tourists on brief trips to the edge of space, was there to show off the sleek pod of a spacecraft and its spidery carrier plane.”

…below are two images from the Virgin Galactic website, click on them to see them at their full size: