Sir Richard Branson and Burt Rutan in VMS Eve, the craft that will carry SpaceShipTwo into sub-orbital space

Virgin Galactic readies for Monday’s unveiling of SpaceShipTwo — the first-class space tourist’s wonder machine at the core of the space tourism firm’s suborbital fleet.

The scene is spacecraft manufacturer Scaled Composites at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California. No doubt, there’s plenty of pomp and circumstance that’s due this debut — although specific aspects about the rocket plane’s rollout remain under wraps.

SpaceShipTwo is a carbon composite cousin in construction and design to SpaceShipOne — the privately financed, single-piloted spacecraft that bagged the $10 million Ansari X Prize purse by flying back-to-back treks to suborbital space in 2004.

Read the rest here…