Richard Branson ready to go where no civilian has gone before

No, it won’t quite be the five-year, or ongoing, voyages of the starship Enterprise (wait until Friday for that on this blog), but suborbital space travel for (relatively) cheap prices is one giant step for mankind closer.

WhiteKnightTwo, a specially designed jet carrier aircraft built to haul the passenger and crew-filled SpaceShipTwo to release altitude of roughly 50,000 feet, will be arriving in California in July.

How big of a step is this? This big:

Some 254 people have plopped down cash to earn priority seating onboard SpaceShipTwo in the first couple of years of suborbital flying, Virgin Galactic President Will Whitehorn explained. “They’ve paid up-front between $20,000 and $200,000 ... and we’ve got about $36 million, as of today, in the bank.”

As the story says, Richard Branson’s cash registers are indeed going to be ringing in space.