Space tour for only US$200,000

With his usual flare, British billionaire Sir Richard Branson abseiled from a balcony, shook up a big bottle of champagne and took a swig while christening the world's first built-from-scratch commercial spaceport yesterday.

Branson's Virgin Galactic will stage its commercial space tourism venture from Spaceport America in a remote patch of desert in southern New Mexico. "The building is absolutely magnificent," he said.

"It is literally out of this world, and that's what we were aiming at creating."

"We're ticking the final boxes on the way to space," Branson said. He hopes enough powered test flights of Virgin Galactic's sleek spacecraft can be done by the end of 2012 to start commercial suborbital flights from the spaceport soon after. More than 450 people have purchased tickets to fly with Virgin Galactic. About 150 of them attended the ceremony.

The $209 million taxpayer-financed spaceport will be a launch station for people and payloads on the rocket ships being developed for Virgin Galactic. Tickets for rides aboard WhiteKnightTwo cost $200,000.

The 2 -hour flights will include about five minutes of weightlessness and views of Earth that until now only astronauts have been able to experience.