‘Spaceport America’ Design Unveiled

LAS CRUCES, NM – Virgin Galactic unveiled the design for the $30-million dollarhangar facility for”Spaceport America” – set to become the world’s first ever commercial port for space travel.

The 100,000 square foot facility set to be built in Southern Sierra County resembles a structure straight out of any futuristic, science-fiction movie.

“It’s dramatic, it’s beautiful and will have very low impact on the environment,” said Will Whitehorn, a spokesperson for Virgin Galactic.

It was designed by a team of American and British architects and will primarily be made out of high tech glass and steel. The port will essentially be built into the ground, with the entire terminal and hangar only rising slightly above the earth’s surface.

The port will offer a training facility where space tourists will embark on a three-day physical training session to get ready for space travel.

Space tourists and visitors will be able to watch the port’s two daily launches from inside the terminal.

Television sets throughout the terminal will also show everything going on inside the spaceships, allowing visitors to witness the action in real time along space tourists.

However, Virgin Galactic officials tell ABC-7 nothing will compare to actually being able to fly up into space. “The 500 people that have been carried into space so far have notbeen able to experience anything like this before…they have not been able to go up there and just look at the planet and the environment and understand the nature of it,” said Whitehorn.

It will cost space tourists about $200,000 to go up into space and 100 people have already signed up and paid in full.

The first spaceship to leave Spaceport America will be in early 2010. The designers of the port say the spaceport is not just about tourism. “Space matters more than anything else to us because there are six -and-a-half billion people on this planet and we don’t have the resources any more to rely just on our terresterial sources anymore.”