After years of working mostly in secret, Virgin Galactic has unveiled WhiteKnightTwo, a vehicle the company hopes will launch the beginning of commercial space tourism.
The plane, named Eve for Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson's mother, was rolled out of a hanger in the Mojave Desert on Monday. There, the company planned to show the vehicle off to industry experts, government officials and a subset of roughly 270 customers who have reserved spots on the firm's first suborbital flights.

The plane's manufacturer, Scaled Composites, plans to begin a series of about 100 test flights of the aircraft later in 2008, Virgin Galactic's president Will Whitehorn said in a video conference with reporters attending the EAA AirVenture show in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.
WhiteKnightTwo is a two-fuselage plane that will be used to loft a spacecraft called SpaceShipTwo to an altitude of 15 kilometres. There, the spaceship will detach from the plane and fire a rocket to take passengers some 100 km above the Earth, where they will experience several minutes of zero gravity.
WhiteKnightTwo features a 43-metre-long wing, underneath which sit two cabins.

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