Virgin Galactic hopes to begin trials of the SpaceShipTwo passenger-carrying rocket planes early in 2009, leading to the launch of operations within 12 months. The eventual Virgin Galactic fleet, developed with aerospace engineer Burt Rutan’s Mojave-based Scaled Composites, will operate from the new Spaceport America rocket port being purpose-built and leased from the New Mexico state government.

The SpaceShipTwo craft cannot actually achieve orbital velocity and will fling themselves up out of the atmosphere after piggybacking on White Knight Two carrier airplane, which is bigger than a Boeing 757. Nevertheless, more than 65,000 people have already paid €130,000 to book a seat aboard the six-passenger craft for a two-and-a-half-hour trip to see the curvature of the Earth and experience five minutes of weightlessness. Virgin’s billionaire founder Richard Branson says he will be on the inaugural flight. In September, Galactic confirmed it would also take off from Scotland in 2013, earmarking Lossiemouth, Kinloss and Machrihanish in the Mull of Kintyre as potential launch pads.

Virgin will not have the skies to itself. On the horizon is SpaceX, the company founded by PayPal’s founder Elon Musk, who recruited dozens of aerospace engineers and challenged them to build a launch vehicle from scratch. SpaceX is months away from launching a €6.9m passenger spacecraft, which has its sights set on the €15m Lunar X Prize being dangled by Google. Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, has said he aims to fly into space himself in 2011. Also on the horizon is Oklahoma-based Rocketplane Global, which will launch Rocketplane XP next spring, which hopes to reach an altitude of 100km.

In a report on the nascent space travel industry in a recent issue of Fund Expert magazine, Fortis concludes that the price of a space trip should come down substantially as a result of competition. The new industry should also mean a boom in new jobs — commercial astronauts, flight attendants, tour operators and so on.

But the flight operators may be more excited at the prospect of getting lucrative government military and scientific research contracts. Fortis reckons that a NASA flight currently costs the US government €1bn each take-off. Virgin Galactic has already announced it will use its space planes to gather scientific data on climate change under a collaboration with a US government laboratory. And SpaceX team is also readying a bigger spacecraft, which it claims can cargo, and eventually crew, to and from the International Space Station.

It is capitalism, but not as we know it.