Nov. 1, 2013 9:39 p.m. ET  Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group, is just months away from launching what he considers "the biggest Virgin company we've ever built." At 63, he's already founded multiple businesses worth billions, including a record label and a mobile company. But it's his foray into outer space with Virgin Galactic that has Mr. Branson excited. And though on this mid-October day he's sipping a latte in his suite in the Mandarin Oriental in Washington, D.C., his mind is far away in the Mojave Desert, where he had recently rallied hundreds of would-be astronauts to fly on Virgin Galactic's maiden voyages.  Those at the September gathering included almost half of the 650 people who have bought tickets to take flight on Mr. Branson's commercial spacecraft as early as 2014. (Current price: $250,000.) After nine years of fits and starts, Mr. Branson was in California showing off the spaceships that are now being built and tested. "This is the start of a new space era," he says. "This is not the endgame." But he admits there are skeptics of his grand plan to send tourists into space. "There are plenty of people who think I should be taken off by men in white jackets for saying it, but I really do actually believe it," he says.  Given that he and his two grown children will be Virgin Galactic's first passengers, he should. With white wavy hair, loose jeans and a white button-down shirt, Mr. Branson projects a very different image from the early astronauts, who went through almost military-style training to go up into orbit. His aim is to attract amateurs.  After launching from New Mexico, each spaceship will take six passengers on a two- to three-hour journey just over 62 miles from Earth. Eventually he hopes to build a hotel in space. There, guests would sleep in plastic pods and look out at the stars while they orbit the moon. "They're quite out of this world," he quips. "What's great fun is just dreaming up ideas and asking the engineers, 'Do you think this will be possible?' "  It was Mikhail Gorbachev, the former president of the Soviet Union, who first inspired the idea for Virgin Galactic. "Gorbachev approached me just after perestroika started to see if I'd like to be the first to go up on a Russian spacecraft," says Mr. Branson. "It would be two years' training in Russia and quite a big check, and I just felt that for that amount of money it would be better to build our own spacecraft."  Today some of his ticket holders "are not wealthy at all and mortgaged their homes," he says. "Others obviously are wealthy." Among those who have signed up are actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Ashton Kutcher and singer Justin Bieber. "We've now got a club, effectively, of astronauts-in-waiting," he says. They meet regularly in places ranging from Mr. Branson's private Caribbean resort, Necker Island, to an ice hotel in Sweden. Some have worked together to set up a scholarship to help students who want to pursue an education in science, math, engineering or technology. So far, most of the astronauts are from the U.S.; the rest come from 50 different countries.  He has encouraged Middle Eastern support, however. Aabar Investments, based in Abu Dhabi, has invested $380 million in Virgin Galactic. Mr. Branson thinks that their nearly 40% stake in the company reflects Abu Dhabi's hope to build a major spaceport in the Middle East.  Since the end of the U.S. space shuttle program, all crewed travel to the international space station has had to use Russian spacecraft. In the past, the Russian government has coordinated space tourism—and has sometimes charged for it. Software magnate Charles Simonyi, for example, paid $20 million to go up to the international space station in 2007 and another $30 million to go back in 2009.  In the U.S., billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have both made inroads into commercializing space. Mr. Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, set up the private space company Blue Origin in 2000. It also plans to take private citizens up to suborbital space. Mr. Musk's company SpaceX has had a series of successful rocket launches, but it has focused first on sending payloads, such as cargo and satellites, into space instead of people.  Mr. Branson hopes that his spacecraft will also reduce the time of travel between continents. Ultimately, a spaceship that takes off from New York could go up above the atmosphere and land at a spaceport in Australia in far less time than today's aircraft, he says. He hopes that within 18 months his rockets will be ready to take cargo loads as well as parts that could be assembled into hotels in space. But for now, he says, "the critical thing is just getting people into space next year in a safe, affordable manner."  Safety has been one of the biggest challenges in building Virgin Galactic. In 2007, two workers died after a tank explosion during a rocket test, and three were seriously wounded. The accident, which occurred at a partner company's facility, delayed the program for an estimated 18 months.  Risk factors weigh on the minds of potential customers as well, especially after NASA's 1986 Challenger disaster, in which seven crew members, including a schoolteacher, died. Mr. Branson thinks that today most people would want to go into space if they could be guaranteed a safe return trip. "Sadly, I think because the space program was run by governments, there was never any real interest in enabling members of the public to go to space after they tried once" with the Challenger, he explains. "After that, they decided not to take any risks whatsoever." He adds, "I would say 90% of people my age thought they would go to space because they saw the moon landing."  Mr. Branson falls into that category. Born outside London to a father who was a barrister and a mother who is now a philanthropist, he has wanted to go to space ever since he saw the first space voyage on television when he was young. Today he thinks space travel is where aviation was in the 1920s. The price for air travel then, adjusted for inflation, is comparable to the $250,000 he is charging for his spaceflights, he says. "My guess is 30 years from now…if enough spaceships will be built, enormous quantities of people will have a chance to go to space," he says.  Next he thinks we'll see deep space exploration, asteroid mining and satellites that monitor everything from global warming to illegal shipping. Mr. Branson says that Virgin Galactic's ability to someday transport satellites could give wireless Internet and telephone access to billions of people who don't have it now, or allow governments and environmental groups to measure weather patterns. The key to the company's launch is galvanizing enough public support. "It's like the birth of any new industry," he says. "We've obviously got to protect our passengers."  Mr. Branson realizes his visions can sound grandiose. "I'll often talk ahead of myself," he says. And it will be at least 20 years before he knows whether his fantasy went too far. "But by talking ahead of yourself, you then get the team to work hard to catch up," he says. "You don't have to be a rocket scientist to be able to run a spaceship company."  Write to Alexandra Wolfe at alexandra.wolfe@wsj.com
Virgin Group founder Richard Branson on his latest out-of-this world venture, Virgin Galactic, and the future of space travel.