Two tickets for space, window seats please

According to Whitehorn, the first commercial space flights for paying tourists are likely to take place within two years. Next month, on December 7, the finished Virgin Galactic craft - comprising the mothership, WhiteKnightTwo, and the smaller craft, SpaceShipTwo - will be unveiled for the first time in their entirety at an event in the Mojave Desert. Whitehorn will be on one of the early test flights. Despite the fact that Lossiemouth has been earmarked as a potential future launch site, few of his compatriots share his vision.

"Scotland is the only country in Europe where we haven't yet signed up customers," he says. Chris Gorman, the entrepreneur, says he will do it but he is waiting to see it first. Brian Souter jokes that one day he might do it."

The Virgin Galactic project has cost $400m (£241m) to develop so far. It received a massive boost earlier this year when it sold a 32% stake for $280m to the Abu Dhabi-based company Aabar Investments, which made $1.5 billion betting on Barclays shares during the banking crisis. As a result, Galactic, which has yet to turn a profit, is now the third-most valuable company in the Virgin stable. Whitehorn is justifiably proud of his baby.

"This is the first wholly reusable human spaceship and it has been built entirely in the private sector without any government funding," he says. "It's the biggest civilian space programme ever undertaken and, when we finish testing, it will have been the biggest test-flight programme in human history, bigger than Concorde's. I've spent a lot of the boss's money. But to put it in context, every shuttle launch costs $1 billion, so we've developed an entire commercial system for less than half the cost of a single shuttle launch."

Whitehorn, who has worked closely with Branson since joining Virgin as company spokesman in 1987, was part of the team that identified the potential for commercialising space in the late 1990s. Part of the Gaia capitalism project, they identified peak oil and global warming as the two biggest challenges facing the company. Virgin realised that whoever could commercialise the cosmos would induce the 21st century's equivalent of the industrial revolution. Thus began their mission to change the face of space.

The Virgin Galactic name was registered in 1999. However, it wasn't until 2001, when Whitehorn was visiting Burt Rutan, the California-based aerospace inventor and former test pilot who was pioneering the use of carbonfibre composite materials in commercial planes, that he stumbled across what would become the prototype for the Virgin spacecraft.

Whitehorn was meant to be discussing what would later become the Virgin Atlantic Global Flyer, the plane that took the aviator Steve Fossett around the world non-stop on one tank of fuel in 2005. In a corner of Rutan's factory, he noticed the spaceship, commissioned by the Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen to compete for the $10m Ansari X Prize for technological development. It was a two-part craft, both parts reusable, and it was top secret. Whitehorn persuaded Rutan to show it to him. Then he went outside and phoned Branson.

"I said, 'Forget about the composite plane. He's building a spaceship,'" recalls Whitehorn. "And Richard said, 'Well, we've got to buy it'."

Rutan's spaceship went on to win the X Prize. It was so different from the previous efforts because it was built almost entirely of carbon composites, it launched not from a rocket but from a mothership and it had a unique "feathering device". This allowed it to change shape in space, giving it a shuttlecock-style descent until it cuts through Earth's atmosphere and changes into a glider for landing.

"The feathering device is the unique piece of genius technology that we have," says Whitehorn.

The Galactic boss, who was nine when he watched the moon landings 40 years ago, is a self-confessed "space nut". Research carried out on behalf of Nasa suggested there are 150,000 people worldwide who are just like him and have the $200,000 needed to do it. But first he had to get what was effectively a science-fiction idea past the rest of the Virgin board. They agreed to fund the project if he could take $10m of deposits from would-be space cadets in seven months.

"The only way to do it was to build a website and announce we were open for business," he says. "Within 24 hours, Philippe Starck, the French designer, had signed up. The second call was from Victoria Principal. Then the phone just kept ringing."

Virgin has now taken $4m in deposits from more than 300 paying customers. The initial enthusiasts include the X-Men director Bryan Singer, the physicist Stephen Hawking, the Star Trek actor William Shatner, the Gaia theorist Professor James Lovelock and the racing drivers Michael Schumacher, Niki Lauda and Rubens Barrichello. A foreign princess has signed up, as have several foreign politicians. Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Hammond have expressed an interest.

"We got approached by someone who turned out to be a porn-film maker who wanted to hire the whole ship," says Whitehorn. "They wanted to make a sex movie in space. I had to turn him down."

The top 100 customers - "astronauts" in Virginspeak - who have all had medical checks and G-force simulation, will enter a lottery to determine who will be the six on the first commercial flight. Training lasts for three days before the launch. The flight itself will take two-and-a-half hours and travel to 50,000ft. Only 20 minutes will be spent in space and passengers have to wear a Nasa-style nappy. In space, there are no loos. They will be weightless for six minutes. Virgin scrapped its initial plans for a two-man capsule when it realised just how important weightlessness was to its potential customers. "They've seen Tom Hanks do it on Apollo 13," says Whitehorn. "Weightlessness is as important to them as seeing the curvature of the Earth."

He refuses to give a date for the first commercial flight. "We're not in a race with anything apart from safety," he says. "We work to milestones. We will begin test flying SpaceShipTwo next year. Within a year, one of us - initially a test pilot - will be in space."

The death of three engineers in an explosion in 2007 at Rutan's firm, Scaled Composites, gave an indication of what can go wrong. Three other engineers, who were also working on Virgin's SpaceShipTwo, were seriously injured in the accident. At present, the risk of going into space is about the same as for climbing Everest. One in 100 doesn't come back. By the time the Virgin testing phase is over, Whitehorn says that the risk will be akin to flying in a private aircraft. "It will be a lot safer than getting in your car and going to Sainsbury's," he says.

But there is no escaping the fact that, however impressive the science, it looks like a vanity project indulging the whims of rich people at a time of environmental concern. Isn't it just toys for boys?

"No," says Whitehorn. "These people are allowing the development of a system which will revolutionise our approach to space. They are the barnstormers. Space tourism is a very small part of the project. We've been quite circumspect about talking about the other parts of it until now. This is an industrial revolution you are about to see. A flood of money will flow into this once we pave the way. The intelligent environmental movement respect this project because they understand what we are trying to do. We only know about climate change because of space."

Space tourism is the catalyst for a range of other activities. Already a number of scientists have signed up for Virgin Galactic flights. Pharmaceutical companies are keen to develop new drugs based on combining chemicals in zero gravity. The Virgin project will allow scientists to go into space affordably and take their projects with them for the first time. It will also greatly reduce the cost of launching new satellites and it will allow for instrumenttesting in space.

Whitehorn would like to see the "server farms" in California, which serve the IT industry and produce more emissions than the aviation industry, relocated to space. He also sees potential for solar panels in space whose energy would be transferred back to Earth by microwaves. Eventually, he would like to see commercial flights around the planet outside the atmosphere. The technology does not exist at present but it is being developed by Reaction Engines in the UK, among others.

"There is lots of technology which works in space," says Whitehorn, who has built the UK's biggest private solar-power facility at his model farm in Sussex where he lives with his wife, Louise, and children, Rose and Angus. "The problem to date has been getting it there. We can solve that. This is an environmental solution, not an environmental problem. We will change the way we use space industrially. It's only 50 miles away. You cannot do any damage in space. We should be chucking everything up there."

In addition to his role at Virgin Galactic and chairing the technology public relations company Next Fifteen, Whitehorn is chairman of the UK Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security. In this capacity, he believes the UK government is incredibly complacent about the energy crises we are facing. He says we will hit peak oil in the next decade.

"We need to find urgent technological solutions," says Whitehorn, who studied history and economics at Aberdeen University. "The government in Britain is absolutely abdicating its responsibility in this matter. It is refusing to accept the fact that we have a real crisis on our hands. Oil is our lifeblood. We cannot do without it. It feeds us. If it becomes permanently expensive, everything becomes permanently expensive.

"When I talk about peak oil, I don't mean oil running out. I mean it becoming very expensive. From 2012 onwards, I don't think oil will ever be below $100 a barrel again. The situation in 2007 when oil peaked at $147 a barrel was a foretaste of what is to come. It's one of the biggest threats facing the human population. The Scottish government understands the situation better but they can't do this on their own. Companies need to find solutions for this. They can't wait for government to do it for them."

Whitehorn is equally frustrated by the British government's lack of foresight in failing to amend the Outer Space Act 1986 to allow SpaceShipTwo to take off from the UK. At present, launches, which are expected to culminate in two a day, will take place in New Mexico. Sweden and Abu Dhabi are also set to become launch countries.

"I think it is a huge opportunity for Britain," he says. "Britain has a fantastic space industry. It employs 50,000 people. We should be at the forefront. But Virgin Galactic is an American company. It has to be because the legislation for it to operate doesn't exist here."

The unveiling of the finished craft in a month's time will help to galvanise interest. The chance of going into space is tantalisingly close for Virgin Galactic's passengers, but it is not close enough for some. The company offers a full refund of the deposit up until six months before the launch.

"We've had one passenger die," says Whitehorn. "One has divorced and has asked for one ticket to be refunded. One lost everything in the Bernie Madoff scandal and the only cash he had was his $200,000 deposit. Currently, we are selling about six tickets a month."

The only people who cannot fly are the under-18s, pregnant women and people who have heart or circulation problems. Stephen Hawking made a zero-gravity flight and coped, though Whitehorn concedes he may not be well enough for the actual space flight. But a 70-year-old Dutch lady who is paraplegic and wants to experience zero gravity has signed up and passed all the medical tests.

"There are very few people who cannot make the trip," he says. "Within a couple of years, the cost will come right down. Eventually we will all move around the planet using this technology."

For Whitehorn, the sky is not the limit. He is the Scot who wants to beam us all up.

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