The first flight will be in about three years, if you believe Virgin, or "I'm not saying when," if you listen to Burt. It will carry — and this is very informed guesswork — William Shatner and Sigourney Weaver. Shatner is the favourite, as he will officially name the ship the VSS Enterprise. So both Captain Kirk of the Starship Enterprise and Ripley of Alien have signed up to pay $200,000 (just over £100,000) for the trip, but they don't yet know who will be on the first flight. If Ripley has anything to do with it, there will certainly be a giant, homicidal lizard. Victoria Principal, the former Dallas star, has also signed up. Burt and Sir Richard Branson will be on board, as, I think, will Branson's dad, Ted. Bill Cullen, the 63-year-old chairman of Renault Ireland, might be there too; he's the only one of the 21,000 applicants for tickets who has paid the whole sum upfront and, boy, is he gagging to be there.
"I certainly think it will be a spiritual experience," he babbles happily. "One great watershed for me was 2001: A Space Odyssey. That was something else. I saw that film 11 times. I was trying to work out what he meant by the end of it. I'm getting ready: I've increased my fitness programme by half an hour a day."
But, to wake up for a moment from babbling and deserts, the facts are these. Apollo 17 landed on the moon on December 11, 1972, and thereafter the US space effort ground to an undignified halt. Nasa invested in the Space Shuttle, the ugliest and most pointless machine ever built. They told the US government it would be 10 times cheaper to put payloads in space with the shuttle than it had been with Apollo's Saturn V rocket. In fact, it turned out to be 10 times more expensive. They also estimated they would lose one shuttle every 100,000 missions. In fact, they've lost two in 113 missions. And yet still Nasa pours billions of dollars and tens of thousands of engineers into the doomed project of keeping this botched dump truck in space.
"You can't fix it by throwing money at it," says Burt, "because you make something that's bad because it's too complex even more complex."
On top of all that, Nasa, having become an insanely defensive bureaucracy, went out of its way to crush all opposition both within and without. Any rival trying to get into space more safely and cheaply was either absorbed or drained of cash and talent. With the collapsing Soviet Union all but dropping out of the space race, and China just clinging onto a precarious toehold, the whole extraterrestrial adventure seemed to be over. A sci-fi generation, now in their fifties and sixties, realised that their childhood dream of roaring rockets taking them up to wheeling orbital space stations and beyond was dead.
Burt made sure that Nasa only heard about his project at the same time as everybody else — when he wheeled SpaceShipOne out on the tarmac at Mojave to be photographed by Aviation Week. He points out sadly that, but for Nasa, we'd be holidaying in orbital if not moon-based hotels already. He has no faith in George Bush's new decision to spend the next 20 years going back to the moon and then on to Mars, because it uses the same old dumb technology and keeps the government monopoly intact. But it doesn't matter, because Nasa won't survive the next 20 years. Burt thinks it is about to be wiped out by a sudden space explosion in the private sector. And so now, at 61, he expects to live long enough to see the first moon resorts.
It all changed and, if Burt is right, Nasa's fate was sealed on June 21, 2004, when Mike Melvill flew SpaceShipOne up to 328,491ft and became the first civilian to fly out of the atmosphere, and the first private pilot to earn astronaut's wings. Burt, sadly, couldn't fly it; he had a heart attack in 1998 and now can't pass the medical to get his pilot's licence. Never mind: on September 29 and October 4, Burt's bird did it twice more and won the Ansari X Prize, a $10m award for the first private-sector team to put a ship in space twice in 14 days. It had cost $26m. Nasa's budget for 2005 is $16.2 billion.
Meanwhile, in London's Holland Park, Sir Richard Branson sits at the end of a huge table grinning and nodding. The old hippie trader is 55 this year, which puts him bang in the middle of the generation that felt let down by space.
"I felt as a teenager that space was exciting and I've marvelled at it ever since. We have a wonderful telescope in Africa and my father spends a lot of time reading about space. One of his favourite quotes is that there are more stars in space than grains of sand on the Earth."
Branson's Virgin being what it is — a let-the-good-times-roll product of 1960s idealistic hedonism, born as the lovely white Saturn Vs were blasting moonwards — it always seemed logical that it should be the first private-sector operator in space. In an act of wishful thinking, the name Virgin Galactic was registered as long ago as 1999. Burt was pondering space back then but nobody knew what he was pondering. Branson had been looking for a promising space project and had been taking an interest in a scheme called Rotary Rocket, also based in Mojave. He was later to ask Burt why all these space projects came out of Mojave. "Because," replied Burt, "there's nothing else to do."
Meanwhile, Virgin had become the backer of the Global Flyer, another Burt beauty which, at the time of writing, was just about to attempt the first solo nonstop round-the-world flight.
In 2002, Will Whitehorn, president of Virgin Galactic, a title so gratuitously cosmic that it seems to embarrass him, and Alex Tai, a Virgin pilot, were at Mojave discussing the Global Flyer when Burt suddenly showed them SpaceShipOne. He has, I noticed, this habit of insisting that he won't talk about future projects and then, suddenly, talking about them. Whitehorn and Tai were bowled over. "It was," says Whitehorn, "the most fantastic thing I had ever seen. It was like Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. It was something you couldn't see anywhere else here on Earth."
