WE have lift-off. Sir Richard Branson has chosen the launch site for his new venture into space tourism.

The Virgin Galactic spacecraft is scheduled to take off in five years’ time from a site near Roswell, New Mexico, in a desert known for UFO legends and alleged alien autopsies.

Rich travellers who pay $200,000 (€169,000) for a ticket will be whisked 60 miles into the sky on the three-hour flights. Up to six passengers at a time will have 20 minutes in space, five minutes of it in a weightless state.

This week representatives from the New Mexico state government will visit Branson in London before the Virgin boss flies to America to announce the deal. The state is to invest €170m in the world’s first commercial space port and Branson has agreed to take a 20-year lease on the site.

Sources close to Branson said that talks for a space flight licence from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) were “going well”.

The stable, sunny weather around Roswell should guarantee 320 operational days a year. At first the craft will fly once a week but the goal is to fly once a day, which will dramatically reduce the ticket price.

The area of the space port occupies a special place for inter-galactic enthusiasts. The so-called “Roswell incident” of 1947 — supposedly a crash landing of a flying saucer that was covered up by the American government — has fascinated UFO researchers for nearly 60 years. Today the myth brings 500,000 tourists a year to the area.

In Ireland two businessman, Bill Cullen, the chairman of Renault, and Tom Higgins, the boss of Irish Psychics Live, are both claiming they will be the first Irish people to travel to space on Branson’s Virgin Galactic.

Cullen, the author of It’s a Long Way from Penny Apples, has claimed he was the first to sign a contract for the flight and to pay, but Higgins has argued that he made the first registered request to go aboard.

Cullen, has said he wants to raise money for charity, but Higgins is to be sponsored by his own company, Realm Communications. The controversial firm specialises in premium-rate phone line services and Higgins currently appears in adverts for some of these kitted out in a space outfit.

Several American states had vied to lure Branson since SpaceShipOne, a vehicle partly backed by the Virgin boss, became the first privately funded craft to make a flight into space in October last year.

New Mexico won the bidding by promising to invest the $200m and to give Virgin Galactic a tax break on the sales of its tickets. Exact details of the site are not yet known, but aerospace industry experts said that it would be located between Roswell and the White Sands missile testing range.

There has been no shortage of takers wishing to be among Branson’s first space travellers. Virgin Galactic has already taken £6.3m (€9.4m) in deposits and has 38,700 people registered to fly.

Celebrities who have signed up include William Shatner, the actor who played Captain Kirk in Star Trek, and Sigourney Weaver, who starred as Ripley in the Alien films.

The breakthrough for Branson came with his deal last year to use technology developed by Burt Rutan, the designer of SpaceShipOne. Rutan’s craft was carried aloft by an aircraft, then launched itself into space powered by a simple rocket motor. It solved the problem of re-entry into the atmosphere by changing the shape of its tail so that it “feathered” like a badminton shuttlecock.

The Roswell area will welcome the return of revolutionary aircraft after eking out UFO fictions for the past five decades to attract visitors.

It was home to the only atomic bomber squadron in the world when it was hit by a violent thunderstorm in July 1947. The next morning a rancher stumbled across wreckage and strange shiny material which he could not bend or tear. The local newspaper published a report claiming the airfield had captured a “flying saucer”.

Much later it was revealed that the debris had actually belonged to a high-altitude balloon being used to monitor Soviet nuclear tests.

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