Chinese tycoon reserves seat on world's 1st comm spaceship

BEIJING: A Chinese millionaire has forked out 196,000 US dollars to blast off in the world's first commercial spaceship at the end of 2008, the state media reported on Thursday.

The 40-year-old electronics entrepreneur from east China's Zhejiang Province, only known by his surname Jiang, will be the first Chinese person to experience space travel with Virgin Galactic, the UK-based company headed by the flamboyant billionaire tycoon Richard Branson.

The new service expects to fly 520 civilian astronauts each year from 2009. Fares will start at about 200,000 dollars for one suborbital flight and will cover three days' training, but this cost is expected to decrease should the private enterprise prove successful.

Jiang, however, has already booked his seat among the first 100 travellers, or "Founders," as Virgin Galactic likes to call them.

He will be joined in space by another Chinese person, a woman.

Three Chinese businesswomen, one from Beijing, one from Hong Kong and one from Sichuan Province are still negotiating over who will take the coveted spot, 'China Daily' reported.

Rupert Hoogerwerf, chief executive of the Shanghai-based Hurun Report, which ranks China's millionaires, is a consultant for Virgin Galactic. He has confirmed that Jiang is ready for take-off.

Jiang will fly in SpaceShipOne, a six-seated aircraft based on the pioneering aviation designs of Burt Rutan. SpaceShipOne cracked the 99-kilometre barrier for manned commercial space travel in 2005, and has been bankrolled by billionaire Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.

Branson has already confirmed that he will board the first flight with his family in early 2008.

So far, 65,000 people have expressed official interest in joining the world's first space travel expedition, and while few have registered from China, Hoogerwerf expects local interest to grow.

Jiang will blast off from the US's New Mexico desert and take a 4-hour ride towards the boundary of space. Once the horizon begins to curve, SpaceShipOne will be jettisoned from the back of a Boeing 727 and undertake a 30-minute parabolic flight across the sky, to counteract the Earth's gravity.

While nowhere near the distance achieved by a NASA Shuttle, Jiang should be able to experience the same weightlessness and disorientation as a professional astronaut.

Whoever he is, Jiang has not yet had to seek any sort of government approval to take his trip to space, the report said.