Commercial space travel has been around since the Jetsons, but today Virgin Galactic presented the model of what they hope will be the first spaceship to take commercial passengers on a two-hour space flight. SpaceShipTwo is the polished, commercial version of SpaceShipOne, which won the $10 million Ansari X Prize back in 2004.
I'm more than certain that when the Ansari X Prize was announced back in '96 no one thought that a non-governmental organization could accomplish such a feat. It did take them over 10 years but here we are, just months away from the first commercial spaceflight. Two hundred wanna-be astronauts have already paid in excess of $200,000 to be on that first flight, and 80 of them have been through medical assessment and centrifuge training.