EUROPE is to enter manned space travel for the first time, almost half a century after the first cosmonaut orbited the Earth.

EADS Astrium, Europe’s biggest builder of satellites and rockets, is this week expected to announce plans to carry tourists into space. The firm is due to unveil plans at the Paris air show for a spacecraft that will carry tourists out of the atmosphere for a brief ride at 3,000mph before ferrying them back to Earth.

Europe stood on the sidelines during the space race between America and Russia in the cold war, largely because of the vast cost. The first human space flight carried Yuri Gagarin, the Soviet cosmonaut, once round the Earth in 1961, and in 1969 Neil Armstrong became the first person to set foot on the moon.

Europe’s programme, conducted through the European Space Agency, has confined itself to unmanned probes, such as the Giotto mission of 1986, which explored the tail of Halley’s comet. However, European astronauts, including the Britons Helen Sharman and Michael Foale, have flown on Russian and Nasa missions.

A spokesman for EADS Astrium said: “We are going to reveal a space tourism project next week for the Paris air show.” The scheme is thought to be the first step in a plan to take space tourists into orbit and even to dock at a “space hotel”.

Although Sir Richard Branson has announced plans to take tourists into space by 2009 he will be in partnership with Mojave Aero-space Venture using American scientific expertise. Some 200 people, including 35 Britons, have paid a deposit.

EADS Astrium is part of a largely Franco-German group that has plants across Europe, including Britain, and also owns Airbus. It has been developing a space tourism project for seven years with the Phoenix, a reusable craft. The prototype is 23ft long, with a 12ft wing span and an aluminium structure weighing just over a ton. The prototype is believed to be one-sixth of the size of the planned vehicle.

The company was one of the first to suggest using the International Space Station as a “commercial facility”, shortly after it went into orbit in 2001.

Earlier this year François Auque, the executive president of EADS Astrium, gave a glimpse of possible ambitions. “Space tourism is already emerging through suborbital flights, and could evolve towards orbital flights if the initial business development is successful,” he wrote in Aviation Week. “In parallel with exploration, private sponsored contests might be organised: planetary rover races, solar sail races and the like.”

He is likely to offer flights to the edge of the Earth’s atmosphere at an altitude of about 60 miles. From there passengers will see the curvature of the Earth and also experience about six minutes of weightlessness. Passengers could expect to pay about £100,000.

A more advanced craft will be required to fly to a “space hotel”, which, like the International Space Station, would orbit 100 miles above the Earth’s atmosphere. Spacecraft have to attain speeds of 17,000mph to get into low Earth orbit, requiring enormous fuel consumption and consequent expense. On descent they generate huge friction, causing the kind of heating that saw the destruction of the space shuttle Columbia in 2003.

Colin Pillinger, 64, who led Beagle II, the failed British mission to put a probe on Mars in 2003, said he would be interested in becoming a space tourist but warned the programme would not equip Europe to conduct manned flight to points within the solar system. “I am not sure if private money in space travel is going to advance scientific research in space,” he said.

So far there have been five space tourists, who have paid millions of pounds to board Russian rockets. Experts believe that the price will come down drasti-cally in a matter of years.

John Zarnecki, who is a professor of space science at the Open University, said: “I am still waiting for the easyJet and Ryanair treatment of space travel.”

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