Burt Rutan is speaking. The experience in question is the one that airline mogul Richard Branson plans to be offering to the public a few years hence at $200,000 a ticket: a ride into space on the world's first passenger-carrying spaceline, Virgin Galactic. A ride nec- essarily brief-the period of weightlessness will be about five minutes-but framed by the bowel-scrambling thrills of a four-G vertical climb and a five-G descent that will feel and sound as if it were taking place in the core of a tornado. Five minutes of weightlessness during which passengers will unbuckle their harnesses and float about the cabin, or press their noses against the windows and take in the panorama of the earth below. Five minutes of space travel. "Sure it'll be scary," Rutan admits. "But if it's not a little scary, it's not worth doing!"
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