Those who predicted SpaceShipOne would usher in a new space age for the private sector got it right.

Commercial space flight is big business already. Virgin Atlantic Airlines is creating a new firm, Virgin Galactic, to start providing suborbital space flights by 2007. Virgin Galactic will be using technology it has licensed from the SpaceShipOne project for $25 million dollars.

Like the zero G flights we reported a couple of weeks ago, there won’t be an economy class on these flights. Each of five passengers will pay about $207,000 for their ticket to ride. It was not reported whether this price includes the training that each of these astro-tourists will need.

Why should we normal folks care if the jet-set becomes the astro-set?

Branson said he planned to use the proceeds from the first well-heeled customers to bring prices down in the next few years to make space travel affordable to the regular tourist.

“The orbital hotel will happen,” he said.

Virgin expects 3,000 customers in the first five years.

No, that headline is not a joke.

Sir Richard Branson today announced that he had signed a licensing deal to create a fleet of spacecraft offering commercial flights to space by 2007-8.

Speaking at the launch of Virgin Galactic Airways, Sir Richard said he planned to invest £60m in space tourism, making it accessible to the general public.

Branson has signed a deal with Mojave Aerospace Ventures and plans to build a fleet of spcaecraft which will take up to five passengers into space at a time, at a cost of about £115,000. He estimates that his fleet will carry 3,000 amateur astronauts into space over a period of five years. The first of them will be, of course, Sir Richard Branson.

Whether this idea takes off or not, the idea of space tourism just a got a whole lot more mainstream. And somebody needs to tell Branson about this idea.

Via GeekPress, it’s only a matter of time before we discover an earth-like planet somewhere out in space. So far, fewer than 150 planets have been located outside the solar system, but that’s about to change:

COROT, a French satellite scheduled to be launched in 2006, is designed to discover planets photometrically. Kepler, a similar American mission, is scheduled for launch in October 2007. And another American satellite, the Space Interferometry Mission (SIM), which will use astrometry, is planned for 2009. The SIM will measure the positions of between 10,000 and 30,000 stars, and to do so a hundred times more precisely than they are now known.

If neither of these missions come up with Class M paydirt, there are two others on the drawing boards that probably will:

America’s Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) and Europe’s Darwin are friendly rivals. The TPF and Darwin will both look at relatively nearby stars—within 50-75 light years of Earth. But there are so many stars within that sphere that it is reasonable to expect plenty of planets to turn up. The reason for that expectation is that enough exoplanets have been discovered already for statistically meaningful inferences to be made about what other planets are out there, and where they are. Two facts stand out. Of sun-like stars that have been closely investigated for any length of time, 15% have planets. And within the range of detectable planets, lower-mass bodies are exponentially more common than higher-mass ones. Put these facts together and it seems likely that small, rocky planets might be very common indeed.

Whether alternative Earths, complete with oceans and life, are common is a different question—but it is one that spectroscopy should be able to answer. When the data from the TPF and Darwin start rolling in, they may provide a definitive answer to that old, nagging question: “is there anybody out there?” How long that answer would take to become commonplace, though, is anybody’s guess.

I’m guessing sooner rather than later.

Question: Let’s say we discover an earth-like planet within 75 light-years of Earth. Once we know it’s there, we point everything we have at it. We quickly determine that it is not sending out any radio signals (thus chances are that there is no resident civilization) but we do confirm that the atmosphere is rich in oxygen. So there is almost certainly life on that planet. Would we start trying to figure out how to get there?

I think we would.

Read the entire article, which is fascinating not just because it provides an excellent run-down on the methods currently being employed to discover extrasolar planets, but also because it was published in (of all places) The Economist.