OUTSIDE the American Museum of Natural History a heavy-set, 50-something man is smoking. He doesn’t look like the typical astronaut. But soon - maybe within a year - he will join his fellow pioneers on the trip of a lifetime to tourism’s final frontier . . . in a Virgin spaceship.

Sir Richard Branson has assembled quite a crew for his new venture, Virgin Galactic. The airline-to-mobiles billionaire was in New York last week at the unveiling of Virgin Galactic’s spaceship. It was the first time passengers and the press had seen the ship, called Space-ShipTwo.

With a few exceptions the astronauts assembled for the first flights look like the original Star Trek crew do today – rich and middle-aged. They don’t look that different from the passengers in Virgin Upper Class.

Nor should they. The days when space belonged to state-sponsored supermen (and women) are over. If the service takes off, as Branson believes it will, in the not-too-distant future space tourism could be as common as transatlantic flight.

To date only a handful of extremely rich private individuals have gone into space. For Virgin Galactic you need $200,000 (£101,00). You don’t need 20/20 vision and a first in astrophysics. You don’t even need all your own body parts. Branson’s 89-year-old father, Ted, is planning a space trip – hip replacement and all.

Virgin’s ship was designed by Burt Rutan, the man behind Voyager, the first plane to fly round the world without stopping or refuelling. In 2004, Rutan won the $10m X-Prize for the first nongovernment organisation to launch a reusable manned spacecraft into space twice within two weeks. Paul Allen, Microsoft’s co-founder, financed Rutan’s winner, SpaceShipOne.

Other wealthy technocrats also have designs on space. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is backing Blue Origin, a secretive Texas-based firm that, according to regulatory documents, plans “safe, inexpensive and reliable human access to space”.

Elon Musk, founder of Pay Pal, is backing Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), which will begin testing its rockets in March. And Robert Bigelow, a Las Vegas hotelier, dreams of building an inflatable plastic space station by 2012.

A study by Nasa and the Space Transport Association predicts that space tourism will be an industry worth $10 billion-$20 billion a year in a few decades.

The new era in space was pioneered by Virginia-based Space Adventures, which has so far taken five people up, starting with Dennis Tito, the world’s first space tourist. In 2001, Tito spent 7 days, 22 hours and 4 minutes orbiting Earth 128 times aboard Russia’s International Space Station. He reportedly paid $20m for the privilege.

In comparison, Virgin Galactic is already mass market. Will Whitehorn, president, expects it to carry 500 passengers in its first year and 50,000 over 10 years, eventually reducing costs to as little as £10,000 per flight.

The would-be astronauts and press assembled at the preview last week were given a tour of SpaceShipTwo, which will accommodate two pilots and six passengers with enough room to bounce around in zero gravity. The craft is launched off a carrier plane, White Knight Two. Virgin has invited other firms to come up with further commercial uses for the launch vessel.

Whitehorn said safety was the company’s first priority. The project suffered a major setback in the summer when an engine blew up and killed three of Rutan’s colleagues. Rutan said they were still assessing the tragedy but he believed the new ship would be “at least as safe as the early airliners were when they were introduced in the 1920s”.

Among the expectant astronauts, safety did not seem to be a worry. Jackie Maw, a property developer from New Zealand, said that when she heard about the venture she thought: “It’s another rental property or this – it wasn’t a hard decision.” Some of her friends have questioned the safety of such a trip, but Maw said: “I have a lot of faith in Burt and in Virgin.”

Dick Hardt, founder of Canadian software firm SXIP, put it more succinctly: “I’m an entrepreneur, I’m risk oblivious.”

The market turmoil does not appear to have dampened enthusiasm for the venture, either. “It’s actually accelerating – we’ve just had our best month for sales,” said Whitehorn. “Clearly a lot of people want to get away from Planet Earth at the moment.”

Eventually Virgin Galactic will have two sources of income. “The business plan is based round space tourism,” said Whitehorn. But he believes that offering relatively cheap access to space for satellites could “revolutionise the use of space for industrial purposes”.

It costs $50m-$100m to launch a satellite and one in ten launches ends in disaster. Whitehorn believes Virgin Galactic could launch small satellites into low-Earth orbit from White Knight Two for less than $2.5m. He believes the company could eventually make 40% of its money from launching satellites.

But the new rush to space is unlikely to bring us close to mass-market moon trips, said Eric Anderson, president of Space Adventures. All Virgin’s trips will be “suborbital”, meaning just above the Earth’s atmosphere and will reach a maximum distance of 110 kilometres above the planet’s surface.

The International Space Station is 402 kilometres up. The technical difficulties in reaching that distance are “a hundredfold at least”, said Anderson. Tourists will not get that high for at least 10 or 20 years, unless they have the $30m that Anderson now charges to shuttle people to the ISS.

Genuine space travel “is not an industry, it is something that happens on the edge of human possibility,” said Anderson. He said the technology used today was fundamentally the same as that of 15 years ago.

What space travel needed was “unobtainium”, he said, some new technology or fuel that would catapult mankind into the wild black yonder. Perhaps the new space pioneers will find that fuel.

“The drive to get into space is part of our DNA,” said Anderson. “I think it’s something that is going to be vital to humanity. It’s a hard problem to solve but it’s worth the effort.”

Times Recommends

• C&G axed - 1,660 jobs to be lost
• UK house prices rise 1.1% as buyers return
• Mixed reaction to US banks repaying bailouts