I've seen the future of space travel at the Virgin Galactic Spaceport

The chai latte served at Spaceport America's Gateway to Space in New Mexico is just as wonderful as the Virgin Galactic employees promised me.

Yes, Sparkling Sweet Tea is delicious, but the signal it triggers in the pleasure center of my brain is only part of the experience. The server that runs Barista Island masters not only foam, but also service and small conversations. And the island itself is an aesthetic treat consisting of a backlit white marble countertop. The dose of caffeine and the shiny surface combine to create the warmest, most fuzzy and most loving awakening imaginable.

Virgin Galactic thinks this is so that your morning should start the day you leave Earth for the first time. The space tourism company Richard Branson Thursday stated that his home at Spaceport is now operational and has welcomed members of the media and dignitaries as the first official guests.

Barista Island is the centerpiece of the Gaia level on the ground floor, but my eyes are drawn to the two-story windows that make up the east façade of the Gateway to Space building.

"We already have almost the impression of being weightless," says Jeremy Brown, Virgin Galactic's design director, as he guides us down the hall from the cavernous hangar of the building and into the living room Gaia.

The landscape on the other side of the glass is a classic desert, the southwest meets the interplanetary future. The dark mountains of San Andres are home to several acres of scrubland under an intense blue sky. The foreground is dominated by the wide apron, taxiway and runway where Virgin Galactic's double-fuselage transporter VMS Eve periodically rises to the skies.

The awesome double jet flies without the space plane powered by a rocket that is designed to transport at high altitude. As part of its ongoing testing protocol, Eve is currently conducting touch operations to transport commercial passengers into orbit as early as this year.

Standing in the middle of a big empty desert and watching the scene is a bit surreal. It's as if the walkway to space and its resplendent windows were a set of augmented reality glasses the size of a building superimposing this vision of the cosmic future on a landscape that is more of the nineteenth century than the twenty-first century.

But the whole scene, with its pilots, Virgin Galactic astronauts, and the operations people doing their jobs, is as real as the hot cup of the cellar in my hand.

I catch Virgin Galactic's CEO, George Whitesides, standing at the end of the interactive walkway between the shed and the apron that lights up with every step. I ask him the inevitable question of when the first commercial customer could start.

"This step (from the operational start-up of Gateway to Space) is important to keep us on track," he said.

And on the right track means that Virgin Galactic's founder, Richard Branson, and his other initial passengers will be launched into orbit within a few months.

At a press conference in MayWhitesides said commercial launches would begin within a year. He told me Thursday that he was still comfortable with this projection.

Lost in the desert

Until recently, the silent Spaceport was the target of jokes in New Mexico and beyond. This does not help the Gateway to Space building look like an abandoned alien spacecraft in the desert.

Over the last 15 years, Spaceport America has gone from dreaming to reality to a nightmare because it was virtually empty in the New Mexico desert many years after its completion in 2011.

Like so many space companies, Spaceport America, a state-owned, publicly-funded facility, and Virgin Galactic have experienced cost overruns, technical challenges, and disappointing turnaround times. The darkest moment came in 2014 when one of the space planes propelled by a Virgin rocket crashed in the California desert during the tests, killing one of the co-drivers.

But the outlook has changed in recent months, as Virgin Galactic was fully recovering from its tragic incident and began moving its operations from the Mojave Desert to New Mexico.

"It's all really real," said Stephen Attenborough, commercial director of Virgin Galactic.

He added that VMS Eve would soon return to California to embark on VSS Unity, the space ship's commercial astronauts who would join him and transport him to his permanent home at Spaceport. Attenborough predicts that Spaceport America will house two planes and five spaceships in ten years.

In a corner of the hangar, the company hopes to later use eight rocket engines to store large crates. His backlog of reservations, which began 15 years ago, will require a lot of power. More than 600 passengers from more than 60 countries filed a deposit to travel in space with Virgin at a price of $ 250,000 (£ 205,800, AU $ 368,375) per seat.

Lost in dessert

Virgin's commercial passengers will spend a few days at the Spaceport to prepare for their orbit journey of about 90 minutes. Then, on the big day, they will gather with their family, their friends, their pilots and their support staff here around Barista Island for a gourmet meal like the one I share with Spaceport CEO Dan Hicks. in the Gaia lounge.

Hicks is a long-time public servant who spent three decades in the US military occupying leadership positions in the adjacent White Sands missile row before being appointed to his current position in 2016 by the New Mexico Spaceport Authority.

Friendly and competent, Hicks can talk at length about the different launch profiles possible from this humble place in the desert. He speculates that it might be wise for SpaceX to launch its rockets from here and then pose them at the company's facilities in Texas. The same goes for Blue Origin by Jeff Bezos, who also has a test center in West Texas.

When our dessert platter arrives – a glass of raspberry sorbet served over a bubbling carbonic ice floe – I ask Hicks about the criticism that the Spaceport is primarily used to subsidize vacations in the space of the rich with the taxpayer money.

"I had hoped this story would disappear," he told me before listing the positive economic effects that the spaceport could have on a region where poverty can often be shocking.

In Doña Ana County, home to most of the few hundred people working at the space port, nearly 28% of the population lives below the poverty line.

"It's about building a space sector," says Hicks. "It's about having companies like Virgin and Spinlaunch (another Spaceport America tenant) moving in here and taking their families."

Of the many UK-based invited journalists and UK-based staff in the room, Hicks and I are from a very particular minority: we are both long-time residents of New Mexico whose taxes are used to finance this. installation in the last 15 years. And yet, this magnificent building financed by public funds is restricted and is open to the general public only during scheduled visits.

Naturally, this is normal for any public space installation for security reasons, but I am always struck by the fact that this luxurious experience and epic winery will be inaccessible to most people who have helped pay for it.

However, Attenborough insists that Virgin's vision is much greater than conducting an orbital ride for the elite.

"What's happening here could eventually translate into a faster and cleaner way to travel the planet," he told me.

It predicts that future competition in the space tourism sector will drive down prices, open access and could even lead to transcontinental rocket flights similar to those of Elon Musk and SpaceX also proposed.

"We do not have the technology yet," warns Attenborogh, adding that 98 percent of the company's efforts are focused on his first commercial astronaut experience. However, part of the long-term vision is to reduce travel times and the environmental impact of transcontinental flights.

So maybe one day we will all go down to the desert of New Mexico to reach Europe in less than two hours, but in the foreseeable future, a trip into space, accompanied delicious yummy lattes and fancy sorbets, will remain in the 1 percent range.