Sir Richard Branson's space tourism company, Virgin Galactic, plans to offer flights into the spectacular celestial display of the aurora borealis. The northern lights have long captivated observers on the ground, but the company now says it is looking for a European base to launch trips that will go high enough to delve inside the glowing sky for the first time. "No human being has ever flown into an aurora borealis," said Will Whitehorn, president of Virgin Galactic. "You have to go beyond the edge of space. I think that will be a magical and mystical experience." Sir Richard's venture is a collaboration with Burt Rutan, who designed SpaceShipOne, the craft that won the $10m (£5.2m) Ansari X-prize in 2004. The prize was awarded for flying a spacecraft capable of carrying three people to the edge of space twice in two weeks. Mr Rutan's company, Scaled Composites, in Mojave, California, is working on a successor called SpaceShipTwo, which will carry six passengers and two pilots. Virgin Galactic will not be drawn on exactly when the tourist flights will start but most observers expect them to launch in 2008 or 2009.

The company already has 100 "founder" members who have each paid $200,000 for a ticket on one of the early flights. Once testing of SpaceShipTwo is completed, the first flight will carry Virgin Galactic staff and the second will take Sir Richard himself. The company is based in New Mexico where the state government is building a spaceport, but a launch site for aurora flights in Europe is yet to be decided. "It's very, very difficult to find locations in Europe," Mr Whitehorn told a conference on space tourism at the Royal Aeronautical Society in London on Wednesday. Most suitable airports were too close to population centres, and only 55 airports in the world had runways long enough.

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We have many times launched unmanned rockets into displays of the aurora, so we know a lot about them. I fairly sure that human passangers would not see much when they are up there -- the visual effects would diminish the closer you get.

The larger, more important aspect of this would be getting rank and file citizens into space on a routine basis. It's the first step toward a more robust space tourism industry.

I suspect that the visual effect you would get from inside the aurora would be stunning. The view out of the window would be of dancing colours as far as the eye can see.

I agree with your point on space tourism. As more people experience sub-orbitl spaceflight the demand for affordable orbital spaceflight will grow. This will force down the cost of launch into orbit. The knock on benefit of this would be that the cost of space exploration will also fall.

You might be right about the visual effects, Waspie.

But the space tourism thing is exciting. One company is contemplating using one of the space shuttles huge empty primary fuel tanks for conversion into a kind of space station. It would actually be a very large interior space, and modifying it is feasible.

People could experience zero-g for as along as they want. There could even be zerp-g "swimming pools" -- huge blobs of water suspended in mid-air that you could swim in and out of.

I've just spent a while trying to find an image of an aurora, taken from inside, by a sounding rocket, but I have failed



I think this plan is unlikely now. the idea was to keep the tank attached to a shuttle a little longer and drag it into orbit with the shuttle. Of course this was at the cost of payload onboard the orbiter. However with the shuttles being retired in 2010 this is almost cetainly not going to happen.

Another idea that has been put forward is inflatable, disposable space hotels. They would be inflated once in orbit. After being used a few times their orbit would simply be allowed to decay.

I have no doubt that as the cost of orbital flights decreases an orbital hotel will be constructed.

This would certainly be something to see. Unfortunately I'll be able to afford a flight somewhere around 2152.