Passenger tickets on the Virgin Galactic space vehicle could fall to $50,000 or less, chief executive Stephen Attenborough has revealed.
The Virgin Group offshoot has attracted around 320 bookings since it launched the programme, with most paying the original fare of $200,000, Attenborough told delegates at the ITT Conference in Dubai.
The number of passengers booked by July 2008 stood at 250.
Attenborough revealed other details of the project, which has generated around $43 million from advance passenger bookings since it was unveiled in October 2006.
Virgin Galactic has generated around 90,000 registrations for the trips, and is hoping to have flown 50,000 passengers within 10 years.
The company is building three ‘motherships’ and five ‘spaceships’- the terms Virgin uses to describe the delivery vehicle – and the craft which takes passengers for the six-minute period of weightlessness into low orbit.
Attenborough said: “This has become the flagship project for Virgin. It’s a 21st century brand.
“Space access needs to be in the private sector if we are to make the world outside more readily available.”
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