WhiteKnightTwo,
carrying SpaceShipTwo, seen here taking a flight over Spaceport
America, …
A Singaporean businessman, his wife
and two children have paid $1 million to become the first Asian
family to fly together on space-tourism airline Virgin Galactic,
the company announced Monday.
"I had lunch
yesterday with a guy who got in touch with us in Singapore, and
over lunch he signed his contract for not just a seat, but for a
whole flight," Virgin Galactic commercial director Stephen
Attenborough said.
Speaking at an
international media and marketing conference in Singapore,
Attenborough said the customer handed over a cheque for $1 million
and asked to remain anonymous because "apparently he hasn't told
his wife yet."
"So he is going to
become, or he and his family will become, the first family from
Asia to become astronauts together," Attenborough said.
The US-based firm,
part of British tycoon Richard Branson's Virgin conglomerate, has
sold bookings since 2005 at $200,000 per seat even though it has
not yet set a firm timetable for space flights to be launched from
New Mexico.
Branson announced
in late 2004 that the firm would launch the world's first space
tourism flights in two to three years but after delays, the target
has now been moved to 2013.
Attenborough told
AFP in an interview that the Singaporean businessman chartered one
exclusive flight for his family on the six-seat aircraft
SpaceShipTwo.
The SpaceshipTwo,
with two pilots, is designed to be launched by a transport plane
called White KnightTwo and will be guided by a rocket motor before
gliding back to Earth.
"They should be
flying in the first year of commercial operations. They'll be
within the first thousand human beings to have ever gone to space,
or they should be," Attenborough said.
He said nine out
of nearly 500 tickets sold worldwide had been bought by customers
in Singapore, which has one of Asia's highest concentrations of
millionaires.
Families from
other countries such as Canada, the United States and Britain have
also bought tickets, Attenborough said.
"About 35 to 40
percent are from the United States, 15 percent from the UK... I
think there are 46 countries now represented in total and for many
of those countries, the people will be the first astronaut for that
country," he said.
Customers from the
Asia-Pacific region now account for "approximately 15 percent" of
ticket sales despite a ban on Virgin Galactic selling seats in
China, the region's biggest economy.
"The space vehicle
is US technology and they fall under a set of regulations in the
United States which means that there are some countries where at
the moment we're not permitted to sell tickets," he explained.
"I think Asia is a
huge opportunity for us, absolutely. Just the interest we've had
from Singapore, which is a fairly small part of Asia, I've been
extremely impressed," he said.
"We have seen an
increasing amount of interest from this part of the world and
hopefully that will translate into lots of future astronauts."
In anticipation of
burgeoning future demand for space tourism, Attenborough said
Virgin Galactic had already ordered more spacecraft.
Attenborough said
the company expected to take three years to recoup its investments,
which he estimated at $300 million to $400 million, with one flight
a week when commercial operations begin.
If everything goes
smoothly, "we would hope to be flying people to space by 2013," he
said.
