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Sometimes, it almost seems to disappear into the desert. Conceived as a conjuring trick of architecture and topography, Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic Gateway to Space rises in a sinuous curve from the New Mexico dust, its steel surfaces weathered into a red-brown mirage on the horizon.

The route that the package-tour astronauts of tomorrow will take through the building has been meticulously devised by the architects of Foster + Partners to foreshadow the journey they will make into space: a concrete ramp ascends gently towards the centre of the building — a narrow, hooded cleft that even in the blinding south-western sunshine forms a small rectangle of perfect darkness.

A magnetic tag worn by each passenger triggers heavy steel doors that will open into a narrow and dimly lit passageway, the walls curving out towards another blackened doorway, and a catwalk with views of the 4,300 square-metre hangar four storeys below, housing the fleet of spacecraft in which they will travel.

And then, the finale: the last set of doors swings open into the astronaut lounge, a vast, open space filled with natural light from an elliptical wall of windows, offering a panorama of the 3km-long spaceport runway, and the sky beyond. The effect is just as the architects intended: although the building is not yet complete, when a group of prospective space tourists was brought to it, they found the experience so overwhelming they were moved to tears.

Yet there remains a great deal at stake out here in the desert. There are now nine locations in the US designated as spaceports, but the New Mexico complex — Spaceport America — is the only one built from scratch and designed to accommodate a regular passenger service. It was raised from nothing on an isolated plain 30 miles from the nearest town.

Creating it has not been cheap: to date, it has cost £155 million and the bill for the runway alone will be £24 million. And although the building at its centre bears Virgin Galactic’s name and was designed to the company’s requirements, it has been paid for by the state of New Mexico, whose citizens voted for a sales tax designed to finance its construction.

On a cold November morning, Christine Anderson, the former US Air Force official now charged with bringing Spaceport America to life, stands on a wind-whipped access road near the Gateway to Space. “This is the beginning of the commercial passenger space-line industry,” she says.

Anderson’s crews are on target to complete their work by the end of this year; Virgin Galactic plans a regular service — launching daily flights into space — for the start of 2014. She is optimistic about the future: daily sub-orbital passenger flights will be followed by point-to-point intercontinental travel that will traverse the globe in the time it takes to watch an in-flight movie; trips out of the Earth’s atmosphere will become as commonplace as taking a bus. “I hope,” Branson says later, “it’s the beginning of a whole new era in space travel.”

But before that can happen, Virgin Galactic will have to finish building its rocket. When complete, SpaceShipTwo’s cabin space will be 2.28m in diameter and 3.5m long, half the size of that in a small business jet.

After a take-off, tethered beneath the mothership — WhiteKnightTwo, a twin-fuselage turbojet with a 42m wingspan — the ascent to launch altitude will be the longest single part of the journey, taking more than an hour to reach nine miles high.

“There’s no drinks service, no newspapers,” says Dave Mackay, the former RAF test pilot and Virgin Atlantic captain who will be in the cockpit for Galactic’s first flights.

Once released from the mother ship, the spaceship drops away to a safe distance, where the pilot ignites the rocket motor, using two cockpit switches. With an unthrottled shriek, the rocket-plane shudders to full thrust within a tenth of a second, its nose pointed straight up to where the air thins towards the edge of space. At the instant of ignition, the passengers are thrown back into their seats with the full force of 3G, like being hurled against a brick wall. It’s 12 seconds to the sound barrier, 30 to Mach 2; within a minute, the spacecraft is travelling at 4,800kph.

“You’ll feel all the effects of what an astronaut goes through going to orbit,” says Steve Isakowitz, Galactic’s chief technical officer, an aerospace engineer and former administrator at Nasa. “The noise, the vibration, the acceleration, are almost the same as if you were sitting there in the Space Shuttle trying to go up to orbit.”

In those few seconds, the sky beyond the cockpit window tumbles through the spectrum of blues, from the rich azure of southern California to navy, indigo and then — abruptly — it turns black. “Not grey, black,” says test pilot Mike Melvill. “As black as black paint.”

After around 80 seconds, and 110km above the Earth’s surface, the pilot cuts the engine, and the rocket-plane enters zero gravity. The passengers have now become astronauts. Releasing their seatbelts, they float around the cabin, and gaze at the view: 1,600km from horizon to horizon, the curvature of the Earth subtle but clear, the fine blue line of the atmosphere easily visible against the blackness of space.

On-board cameras will capture every second of the experience, according to Virgin Galactic’s Mark Butler, who is leading the company’s preparations to open Spaceport America: “It will be the most photographed event of their lives,” he says.

It will also be one of the shortest. At the top of a parabolic arc, the rocket-plane will spend only four minutes in space before it begins to fall back down to Earth. The pilot positions the “feather” for re-entry, and the six passengers will fold their seats flat to enable them to cope with the 4-5G of acceleration they’ll encounter when returning to Earth’s atmosphere. After a 15-minute glide, they land on the runway.

If everything goes to plan, it may, after all, be possible for the world’s first commercial space-line to begin service from Spaceport America within a year.

In the meantime, the £130,000 tickets keep selling. At the start of last year, actor Ashton Kutcher became the 500th person to sign up, joining cosmologist Stephen Hawking, designer Philippe Starck and Dallas star Victoria Principal on the list of passengers. But not all the celebrities so far reported to be planning sightseeing trips in space have reserved tickets. Virgin has been discreet about the full list; all it will reveal is that, in the interests of democracy, Branson has insisted that no one gets a complimentary Branson has insisted that no one gets a complimentary ride, no matter how famous they are.

See the rest of this feature within the March 2013 issue of WIRED, on sale now.