UK rocket man who's racing the billionaires into space

You're sitting in your seat with your in-flight magazine in hand, staring out of the window, when you notice the sky outside has turned black, the stars are brighter than ever and you can see the curvature of Earth. As the captain announces it is now safe to release your seatbelt you do so and gently float out of your seat, experiencing weightlessness for the first time. This is space: the ultimate holiday destination.

And within just two short years a Manchester-based company could be offering such trips in a home-grown spacecraft called Thunderstar.

The company, called Starchaser Industries, was originally set up to place satellites in orbit. But now it has joined a couple of dozen, mainly US, companies in a whole new space race to see who will make space tourism a commercial reality.

Later this year Starchaser plans its first space launch from a spaceport in New Mexico. If the company's founder, Steve Bennett, is successful, his spacecraft will become the first British rocket to be launched into space in more than 35 years and by 2009 the first ever to launch a man into space.

Mr Bennett, 42, a former toothpaste factory worker and now a space lecturer at the University of Salford, is very much the David in the space race, trying to outsmart and beat such well-financed Goliaths as Virgin boss Sir Richard Branson, dotcom billionaire Paul Allen - co-founder of Microsoft - and Elon Musk, co-founder of the online payment firm PayPal.

And only last week Jeff Bezos, the founder of online bookstore Amazon, released a video of the first test flight of his spacecraft, the first stage of his project called Blue Origin, to take people into space.

Sir Richard's specially-designed spacecraft will fly more than 200 astronauts into the stratosphere, while Mr Bennett - who built his first table-top rocket aged 13 - aims to send three intrepid travellers into space via a rocket.

Just like Sir Richard, he will also board his own maiden flight. He has already sold the other two seats to an unnamed couple for £98,000 each, undercutting the £120,000 cost for the Virgin Galactic flight.

Both flights offer the thrill of up to five minutes of weightlessness in space, but the similarities end there.

Sir Richard's passengers will land back on Earth like a conventional flight, whereas Mr Bennett envisages that he and the mystery couple will descend by parachute from their capsule at a height of about 25,000ft.

Mr Bennett said: "The capsule will break off from the rocket and hover in space before the descent when the parachutes will be released.'' He has already unveiled his unmanned Skybolt rocket which will act as a forerunner for Thunderstar by completing a number of test flights. Skybolt will be flown from an overseas launch site next year as it attempts to reach heights of 130km (83 miles) into space.

Mr Bennett's dream is not as fanciful as it might seem. In 2004 a small homemade spacecraft called SpaceShipOne (SS1) made the history books by becoming the first privately developed manned vehicle to go into space. And by climbing to an altitude of 100km - officially the edge of space - twice within two weeks it also won the Ansari X-Prize.

This $10million (£5 million) prize was modelled on the Orteig Prize, which encouraged Charles Lindbergh to make the first solo flight across the Atlantic. With the X-Prize, however, the aim was to try to get private commercial space travel off the ground.

And it seemed to work. Burt Rutan, the American space veteran who developed SS1 with his company Scaled Composites, showed that it doesn't take millions of litres of liquid oxygen, a rocket the size of a skyscraper and hundreds of millions of dollars to launch a person into space. He was able to do it with just a small shuttlecock-shaped rocket not much bigger than a car.

Now, following this success, the next space gauntlet has been thrown down - the America Space Prize. This $50million (£25million) prize will go to the first company to achieve a new challenge. First they must get into orbit, an altitude of 400km and considerably more challenging than the suborbital flights of the X-Prize. There the spacecraft, capable of carrying five people, must orbit the Earth at least twice and dock with an inflatable space hotel before returning to Earth. Then to claim the prize they must do it all over again within 60 days using the same vehicle.

Again, this is not quite as crazy as it sounds. Robert Bigelow, the American billionaire hotelier who created the challenge, has bought the rights to commercially develop a novel space station design conceived by Nasa. Despite sounding flimsy these inflatable modules are incredibly durable and offer much greater benefits over the rigid ones used in the International Space Station, not least the ease of getting them into orbit.

Although Starchaser is not committing to going after the America Space Prize, it has every intention of offering commercial suborbital flights by 2009 and eventually orbital flights in the following years.

To help get it off the ground, earlier this week the company was awarded a ¤150,000 (£98,000) grant from the European Space Agency. But Sir Richard also plans to offer suborbital flights from a spaceport he is building in New Mexico in early 2009 and will drop the price to $20,000 (£10,000) after the first 1,000 customers.

So to survive in the face of such competition and proven technology Starchaser clearly has its work cut out. But whether Steve Bennett has any chance of winning remains to be seen.