Better than anything we could have imagined and proving Sci-Fi novels and movies wrong of what the future would really behold, Sir Richard Branson is sending 8 people at a time into space as soon as next year! Having making nearly everything he has touched into gold, Branson sees a huge potential in space travel.

“I think it’s very important that we make a genuine commercial success of this project,” he told a news conference in New York.

“If we do, I believe we’ll unlock a wall of private sector money into both space launch systems and space technology.

“This could rival the scale of investment in the mobile phone and internet technologies after they were unlocked from their military origins and thrown open to the private sector.”

With already 200 booked flights, at $200,000 each, and 85,000 registered as “interested” to fly, Branson may be onto something indeed. Initial flights will be “launched” at Spaceport America located in the New Mexico desert. Six ticketed passengers and two pilot astronauts will fill the first commercially flown space ship sometime next year.

Virgin Galatic’s spacecraft, named SpaceShipTwo, is nearly complete at 60%. Testing of the space craft begins later this year.

[Via BBC News]