British billionaire Richard Branson unveiled the spaceship "SpaceShipTwo" in the California desert of the Mojave on Monday. The commercial trips to the space will start in 2011. The first "space tourists" from the earth will be taken to the space with spaceship "SpaceShipTwo" under the banner of his company Virgin Galactic.

In the hangar of the airbase and spatial Mojave, 130 miles northeast of Los Angeles (California, western United States), Richard Branson made the space shuttle SpaceShipTwo and its mother ship, "The White Knight ", ensuring that they represented" the future of human transportation.

The governors of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and New Mexico, Bill Richardson, then sprayed champagne on nose of SpaceShipTwo, renamed Virgin Space Ship (VSS) Enterprise, before hundreds of journalists and a quarantine of future passengers, who paid 200,000 dollars for the promise of a trip into space as early as 2011.

"We want this program marks a beginning in the era of commercial space travel," said Branson since the lunar landscape and snowy Mojave, where the temperature Monday was dropped to -4 degrees.

He assured that "no one would fly in a spaceship before (Virgin Galactic) has made many, many, many flights" test.

Hours before the official presentation, the spirited billionaire with silver hair told AFP: "I love creating things that I can be proud and revolutionize the industry."

The idea of sending people into space "came to me long ago when I watched the moon landing. I said to myself, plus one day this will be my turn", "he said.

"I think NASA will never be the same after our entry into this industry," he added, before the shuttle carbon composite suspended its "white knight".

The latter, referring to two jets joined by a common wing is decorated with an emblem depicting a young woman plunged into space, supposedly representing Eve, the mother of Richard Branson.

Pamela Hurley-Moser, director of a travel agency in Portland (Maine, northeastern United States) part of the few able to sell tickets for space, told AFP that "many customers had paid between 20,000 and 200,000 dollars "to acquire a place in the shuttle.

"The more you prepay, the more you travel early," she explained, saying that 300 customers are already candidates to start.

Richard Branson, aviation enthusiast and extreme sports enthusiast, will be the first with his family, to make the maiden voyage, accompanied by the designer of the shuttle, the American aerospace engineer Burt Rutan, he said.

Mr. Branson explained that the device was designed to slowly return to Earth as "a giant badminton shuttlecock" to avoid overheating, one of the greatest dangers when returning to the atmosphere.

In space, space tourists will rise from their seats and watch the Earth through huge windows, and experience weightlessness.

New Mexico is building, and Upham, a "spaceport" with a track more than 3 km, from which the VSS Enterprise will operate. The facility should be completed in late 2010.

Richard Branson gives an interview with AFP at his spaceship in the Mojave desert, California, December 7, 2009.