Plans call for the hour-long ride to start in Burns Flat, Okla., a town of 1,782 people located 100 miles west of Oklahoma City that houses the Oklahoma Spaceport, a former Air Force base that is expected to start launching test space flights next year.

The operator of the flight, Rocketplane Ltd.'s Rocketplane Kistler unit, plans to run 25 to 50 test flights during 2008, according to Herrington, who is the Oklahoma City-based company's director of flight operations. Rocketplane Kistler is one of two companies that was chosen by NASA last year to provide outsourced flights to the International Space Station for bringing up crew members and replenishing supplies.

The other company, El Segundo, Calif.-based Space Exploration Technologies Corp. -- or SpaceX, for short -- has received more publicity than Rocketplane Kistler has thus far. SpaceX, which was founded by PayPal Inc. co-founder Elon Musk, is using a more traditional rocket design. It had a failed launch last March but is planning a second one next month, when it will attempt to transport the cremated remains of more than 100 people, including astronaut Gordon Cooper and Star Trek actor James "Scotty" Doohan.

A third company, Vienna, Va.-based Space Adventures Ltd., has already sent four private citizens, including Ubuntu Linux developer Mark Shuttleworth, into space using Soyuz spacecraft from the former Soviet Union. Charles Simonyi, a former chief software architect at Microsoft, is training for a flight with Space Adventures this March.