At Last! Images of Space Ship Two revealed for the first time.

Burt Rutan, aircraft designer extraordinaire, has finally revealed in a press conference the first images of the suborbital space ship he's building for Virgin Galactic, the commercial spacetravel agency most likely to offer wealthy would-be astronauts the first regular flights to experience weightlesness and observe the curvature of the Earth.

Journalist Alan Boyle was present at the press conference, and you can read his impressions of the event here. Computer renders aswell as production photos can be seen here.

How curiosly eerie is to see the photos of these seemingly ordinary workers building something that you know it is destined to leave our atmosphere in an incredible enginnering accomplishment. It almost feels like a crazy garage experiment of some excentric mad scientist -and when you look at someone like Rutan, he definitely captures the maverick spirit and non-comformist nature of the mad scientist, something I find EXTREMELY cool :-)

Personally, I liked more the aesthetic lines of Space Ship One, that kind of followed a retro-futuristic look; but now her new sister will not only be larger, but ressembles more an ordinary business jet thanks to the enlarged nose and the bigger fusselage -with room for 6 passengers and 2 crew members.

And although I know my chances for being onboard one of these new commercial spaceships are rather slim, to say the least, I nevertheless welcome and applaud these efforts that contribute in a small way (or maybe not so small) to make humankind a extra-planetary civilization.

To Infinity and Beyond!