SpaceShipOne Blasts Off on Second Journey

The private spaceship on which Sir Richard Branson is pinning his dream of a galactic tourism industry today blasted into space for the second time.

SpaceShipOne - making the trip as part of the quest for a $10m (£5.5m) prize - was launched, attached to a jet, at from Mohave airport, south-eastern California, at 1512BST, beginning a one hour climb through the earth's atmosphere.

At around 47,000 feet, the craft was released into a brief glide before its pilot, Michael Melvill, fired its rocket motor and pointed the nose up towards space.

Initial reports said the craft had left the earth's atmosphere at around 1620BST. After a few minutes of weightlessness, it was intended to fall back into the atmosphere and glide back to the airport.

SpaceShipOne is competing for the Ansari X-Prize, which will be awarded to the first team to build a spacecraft without government help which can take three people - or the equivalent weight - to a height of at least 62 miles. The same craft must then repeat the feat within two weeks.

The craft made history when it reached that height on a test flight in June, but it was not, at that time, challenging for the prize.

SpaceShipOne's creators, Scaled Composite, headed by aerospace engineer Burt Rutan and backed by Miocrosoft's billionaire co-founder Steve Allen, plan to launch the second flight on Monday.

The Ansari X-Prize was modelled on the $25,000 prize that Charles Lindbergh won in his Spirit of St Louis for the first solo Transatlantic flight between New York and Paris in 1927.

The St Louis-based X-Prize Foundation hopes to inspire an era of space tourism in which spaceflight is not only the domain of government agencies such as NASA.

On Monday, adventurer and entrepreneur Sir Richard announced that his Virgin Group plans to offer passenger flights into space aboard rockets based on SpaceShipOne by 2007. He believes he will fly around 3,000 people into space in the first five years of operation of his Virgin Galactic space line.