Space travel salesman draws a blank

India may be among the second fastest growing economy in the world with 69 billionaires, but when Stephen Attenborough left India on Thursday night he was very likely an unhappy man.

Attenborough, chief executive officer of Virgin Galactic — the brain child of celebrity entrepreneur Richard Branson and world’s only private company plans to send civilians into space as tourists for a $200,000 a pop — was a speaker at the 2001 edition of the annual India Leadership Forum organised by Indian IT lobby Nasscom.

That business was also prominently on his mind during his second visit to India was evident from his travel companion, Sunit Jairath of European travel agency Deluxe Travel — an “accredited space travel agent.”

Jairath flew in from Vienna, Austria, just in case one of India’s IT fraternity, which exported $50billion worth of services in 2010, had a sudden urge to spend some Rs90lakh for space travel.

Attenborough said that although there has been a “lot of interest” from India, there has not been any confirmation yet besides Santhosh George Kulangara, an adventure traveller and entrepreneur from Kerala who paid up in 2006 for confirmed seat on the first flight.

“Some wanted to look at the space flight as a possible Diwali gift, some sons wanted to gift it to their fathers and some other wanted to look at the possibility of having a space flight for a honeymoon,” elaborated Jairath, who said hundreds of inquiries have come in so far from India.

Globally, around 400 people have already booked their seats for Virgin Galctic’s space flights.  As for the space flight itself, there is a fair degree of uncertainty about when it will be eventually ready to take off.

“Test flights are currently happening and we still need to get regulatory clearances from federal aviation authorities,” Attenborough said.

“Based on current visibility, the best case scenario is that everything would be ready for take off by end of 2012,” said the chief executive of Virgin Galactic, that has a commercial “spaceport” - a launch facility for a “spaceline” that operates a “space flights - in New Mexico state of United States.

In the first year of commercial operation Virgin Galactic will be flying twice a week. In the long run, 2 flights per day are planned. Each flight can carry six passengers along with two pilots.

While for now, the launch site will be the US, the Attenborough does recognize the cheaper launch facilities that countries like India has to offer and does not rule out the possibility of that happening at some point of future.

“We could potentially have space flights from here, at some point in future, especially for the scientist community, who could use such test conditions for conducting certain kind of experiments,” Attenborough said.