A First Look Inside the Virgin Galactic Spaceship

Sir Richard Branson, the business tycoon behind the Virgin conglomerate, has been trying to get paying customers into space for years. His Virgin Galactic company was founded in 2006, and in 2009 construction began on Spaceport America, the Norman Foster-designed facility in New Mexico that flights will launch from.

And now we finally have a look inside the spaceship itself. The BBC's Richard Scott has become the first journalist to poke around what will probably become humanity's first commercial spaceship. For a price of $200,000 the SpaceShipTwo will take you 70 miles above earth for five minutes of weightlessness. Virgin Galactic is hoping to begin flights in 2013.

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To be completely honest, SpaceShipTwo looks a little rickety in its current form—but, as Scott notes, it isn't yet finished. You can see the video at the BBC here.