Until now, getting to space has been reserved almost exclusively for astronauts who have passed through rigorous training by government agencies. This causes some people to wonder, What if you want to travel beyond our atmosphere, but you can't make the cut as an astronaut? Or what if you would simply rather make the trip explicitly recreational? Virgin Galactic seeks to answer this question. Presently, only a limited number of extremely wealthy individuals have had the opportunity to become space tourists and travel beyond our atmosphere, but many more are on Virgin Galactic's passenger list, awaiting the word that it's their time to fly in space.

British billionaire industrialist Sir Richard Branson founded Virgin Galactic with the goal of making space tourism accessible. Branson and world-renowned aircraft designer Burt Rutan are hoping to make traveling to space more feasible through the design and creation of the world's first civilian passenger spacecraft, SpaceShipTwo, and its turbo-rocket counterpart, WhiteKnightTwo. This spacecraft is designed to make suborbital space flight available to the common passenger -- provided, that is, that he or she can come up with the $200,000 it costs to ride in this six-passenger vehicle.

Most commercial passenger jets achieve ideal cruising altitudes between 30,000 feet (9,144 meters) and 40,000 feet (12,192 meters), or about 5.6 miles (9 kilometers) to about 7.6 miles (12.2 kilometers), depending on weather, location, flight plan and other factors [source: Boeing]. Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo is more adventurous, reaching a cruising altitude of approximately 68 miles (110 kilometers) above the surface of the Earth -- that's 359,040 feet, or roughly 12.3 times the height of the summit of Mount Everest. This bit of high flying will place the spaceship 6.2 miles (10 kilometers miles) above the Kármán line, the widely accepted boundary between the atmosphere and space.