WANT TO FLY INTO SPACE? GET IN LINE BRANSON READY TO START AVIATION REVOLUTION.

Byline: Jim Skeen Staff Writer

MOJAVE - A commercial spaceliner and a Woodstock-like space festival are the next planned steps in what has been called a ``personal space flight revolution.''

As SpaceShipOne is readied in Mojave for Monday's dawn flight toward capturing the $10 million Ansari X Prize, the principle players are planning to keep the momentum going in the new private space race.

The first commercial spaceliner is the goal of a technology licensing agreement between billionaire Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Atlantic airline, and Mojave Aerospace Ventures, the company formed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and SpaceShipOne designer Burt Rutan.

And New Mexico is working with the X Prize Foundation to host a 10-day space festival in Las Cruces that would feature multiple space launches, contests for performance of spacecraft, and educational camps.

Branson plans to build a fleet of spaceships with the first, dubbed VSS Enterprise, to begin service in 2007. Among the planned first passengers of the new service, called Virgin Galactic, are Sir Richard himself and Rutan.

``Virgin Galactic will be run as a business, but as a business with a sole purpose of making space travel more and more affordable to people throughout the world,'' Branson said in his announcement last week. ``We will reinvest funds raised over the first few years of flight back into the business, striving constantly to lower prices.''

Initial flights are expected to cost in the range of $190,000.

``We will also reinvest profits to make Burt's dreams of orbital flights come true, and, one day, hopefully in our lifetimes, we would like to see a Virgin hotel in space,'' Branson said.

Among the technologies that could be transferable from SpaceShipOne to a new spaceliner is the feathered, carefree re-entry. During re-entry, SpaceShipOne's tail booms pivot upward and the spacecraft drops back into the atmosphere like a badminton shuttlecock. Once back in the atmosphere, the tail booms pivot back down, and the spaceship glides back to Earth.

``Any system that will ever go out there and fly space tourists needs to be a hundred times or more safer than any manned spacecraft that has ever flown,'' Rutan said. ``We are extremely confident that we are going to be able to produce a space tourist commercial spaceliner that will start out service with reliability, I believe, significantly better than when they started airline service decades ago.''

The technology licensing agreement is potential worth over $100 million over the next 15 years.

``Now we have, basically, a prime contractor in Virgin and Richard Branson,'' said Allen, who spent over $20 million on SpaceShipOne's development. ``We are incredibly enthusiastic about this opportunity.''

Foundation co-founder Peter Diamandis, who called the SpaceShipOne flights as the start of the ``personal spaceflight revolution,'' said six to 10 other teams signed up for the Ansari X Prize competition could complete their spaceships for a New Mexico festival.

Rick Homans, secretary of New Mexico's economic development department, said the planning for the event will begin in earnest once the Ansari X Prize is won. He said the state was looking to line up sponsors and television coverage for the event.