Richard Branson and Burt Rutan have launched a spaceship company, titled -- appropriately enough -- The Spaceship Company:

Branson told the Oshkosh crowd that the commercial spaceship can carry 7 paying passengers, along with a two-person flight crew. “We hope that we can get those spacecraft built roughly two and a half to three years from now,” he said.

Once the fleet of suborbital craft is built, a base from which to operate the spaceships is to be set up within the United States. “We still haven’t decided on which state the base will be,” Branson said, adding that the space tourist-carrying vehicles could rocket spaceward from the Mojave, California desert, Las Vegas, New Mexico, or possibly Florida.

“That’s all to be decided,” Branson said...

At present, seats onboard Virgin Galactic spaceships are price tagged at $200,000 each.

But Branson hopes that this seat price will drop over time. “Our aim is to bring the price down,” he said.

“Our principal aim behind this is not to make money. The principal aim is to reinvest any money we make into space exploration,” Branson said. “We expect to double, triple, quadruple the number of astronauts in the next few years that have currently experienced space,” he said.

To date, Branson said, about a 100 pioneers have been willing to pay $200,000 to be the first people to go into space via Virgin Galactic. “These are the kinds of people who are going to enable us to bring the cost of space travel down,” he stated.

I think I like this guy.

The hypothetical locations make a lot of sense, given the tourism focus of Virgin Galactic -- what better place to cater to the space travel urges of tourists than the tourist meccas of Las Vegas and central Florida? Interestingly, launching from Florida would put the operation within a few hours' drive of Miami, notable for both its hip style and its wealthy residents. It certainly couldn't hurt marketing efforts if wealthy, trend-setting South Beachers started taking rides on SS2.