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Summary Sir Richard Branson rappel down exterior wall of his newly unveiled commercial spaceport.
British entrepreneur and Virgin founder Sir Richard Branson dedicated the worlds first commercial spaceport on Monday with a splash of champagne. Branson joined government officials in Las Cruces, New Mexico to celebrate the renaming of the Spaceport America, now dubbed the Virgin Galactic Gateway to Space.Home of Virgin Galactics two test spacecraft, WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo, the $209 million taxpayer-financed building was designed to be a green building by UK-based Foster Partners, URS Corp and New Mexico architects SMPC.Branson, who has made a name for himself in pursuing futuristic technology, told the crowd about the planning that went in to the space-age structure.Already 450 tickets, at $200,000 a shot, have been purchased for the commercial flights into space. The suborbital flights will last two and half hours and feature about five minutes of weightlessness. A hundred and fifty ticketholders joined Branson for the celebration.Virgin Galactic plans to finish testing by the end of 2012 and to start flights soon after.
