Branson Quits Counting to Galactic Launch

British billionaire Richard Branson says he has “stopped counting” days to the official launch of his space tourism business out of Upham, N.M., because it gets delayed “to the next year, to the next year.”

The founder of Virgin Galactic made the comments to reporters as he met with students on his first visit to his young persons business school called Virgin Academy in Warsaw, Poland, on Wednesday.

He says it will be at least another 12 or 18 months before the Virgin Galactic venture can offer paid space travel to adventurers, which is generally within previously announced time frames.

That would put the first launch about as early at October of next year or about four months into 2014.

Just last week, a Virgin Galactic official at the International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight in Las Cruces said the company tentatively planned to launch its first two-stage flight to the edge of space in December 2013, about 14 months away.

The company has received deposits of $67.5 million for the $200,000 ticket to the edge of space from 546 people from 50 countries, according to Carolyn Wincer, head of the travel and tourism department for Virgin Galactic, who also spoke at the symposium.

Spaceport America also stands to benefit from non-tourist commercial space launches once that business gets established. Virgin recently announced it had developed a new vehicle to carry satellites into space.

LauncherOne will be carried to an altitude of about 50,000 under the double-hulled WhiteKnightTwo aircraft. At that altitude, LauncherOne will be released by the mothership and its rocket engines fired for the final leg of the journey to space. It is designed to carry satellites weighing about 500 pounds into low Earth orbits.