Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic has taken the wraps off the vehicle that it hopes will launch tourists into Earth's atmosphere.
Guests including Arnold Schwarzenegger were at the company's spaceport in the Mojave Desert to see WhiteKnightTwo unveiled today.
The craft, called a Mother Ship, will not enter space itself but climb to a height of 15,240 metres. It will then launch a second vehicle, SpaceShipTwo, into sub-orbit.
Six passengers will travel at four times the speed of sound to a height officially classified as space, experiencing around five minutes of weightlessness before gliding back to earth.
The company says that more than 250 wannabe astronauts have already put down a deposit for the two-and-a-half-hour flight.
At the launch, Richard Branson commented that with the end of the oil era approaching and climate change progressing much faster than models have been predicting, the utilisation of space is essential for the logistics of survival through things such as weather satellites, agricultural monitoring, GPS, and climate science.
He added that he also believes that someday we will be able to use space as a source of energy for the planet through solar power satellites, using the most sustainable source available - the sun.
