It’s never too early to start your Christmas shopping, but you better start saving those pennies if a family spaceflight is your cup of tea.

A family trip for six aboard a suborbital Virgin Galactic spaceliner – a modified SpaceShipTwo vehicle designed by aerospace veteran Burt Rutan – is going for a cool $1.76 million, according the Christmas Book, an upscale catalog of gift ideas by Neiman Marcus. But you’ll have time to start saving for the trip since the first flights won’t start until 2009.

British billionaire Sir Richard Branson unveiled a concept interior for his Virgin Galactic spaceliners last week here in New York, hinting at a roomy cabin flush with windows to offer pristine views of the Earth during those brief four minutes of weightlessness during a standard suborbital flight. [Click here for an image gallery, and here for a video]. 

Each Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo, which is air-launched from about 10 miles up from its carrier craft WhiteKnightTwo, carries eight people – two pilots, six passengers – with a single seat priced at about $200,000, so you’d think a half-dozen seats would cost about $1.2 million altogether.

But for $1.76 million, Virgin Galactic is offering not just the chartered suborbital spaceflight and its requisite preflight training, but also a four-night shindig for 12 (that’s six spaceflyers and one guest each) at Branson’s private retreat on Necker Island in the British Virgin Islands. Sir Richard himself will present guests with their Virgin Galactic astronaut wings during the post-flight festivities.

Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo is an evolution of Rutan’s $10 million Ansari X Prize-winning SpaceShipOne – the first privately-developed vehicle to reach suborbital space with a pilot at the helm. SpaceShipOne flew three times in 2004, with the last two within two weeks of one another to win the X Prize.

But commercial Virgin Galactic flights are still a few years off. Branson said last week that the initial SpaceShipTwo and WhiteKnightTwo vehicles are under construction at Rutan’s Mojave, California-based Scaled Composites firm. They are expected to roll out in about a year, with a comprehensive series of test flights to follow after that.

And if a family trip to suborbital space doesn’t catch your eye, there’s always that seven-foot high, $40,000 skyscraper built entirely out of pencils to choose from too.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 4th, 2006 at 3:47 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.