Eat your heart out, Lance Bass.
Former primetime soap star Victoria Principal has booked a ride with Virgin Galactic, British airline mogul and adventurer Richard Branson's answer to futuristic rapid transit.
The starry-eyed Virgin Atlantic founder's latest project is a space tours firm that he plans to have in operation and blasting well-heeled travelers into orbit by the end of 2010 or, more optimistically, spring 2008, according to Britain's Independent newspaper.
Principal, who starred as Pamela Ewing on Dallas for nine years, apparently kept some of that Texas oil money, because passage on Virgin Galactic's inaugural flight is going for $200,000.
Which, admittedly, is quite a bit less than the $20 million that Bass was expected to pony up for a ride on a Russian space shuttle back in 2002.
But now, if you believe Branson and his enthusiastic team, space travel is going mainstream.
"It's time we rediscovered the thrill of space," Virgin Galactic exec and former Royal Air Force officer Will Whitehorn, told the Independent. "The key thing is that, with the new technology that's available, we can make the dream a safe, affordable reality for thousands of people."
He said that Virgin is hoping to get its price down to around $75,000 a ticket eventually. "I think we'll get tens of thousands of customers at that price."
Whitehorn said that the 61-year-old Principal and her fellow tourists will first be ferried to a "space resort" California's Mojave Desert, where they'll undergo several days of rigorous medical tests, G-force tolerance training and flight simulations in order to make sure that the non-astronaut space pioneers can handle speeds of up to 3,000 miles-per-hour and other unearthly conditions.
Then, once they're up, up and away at 100 miles above the earth, passengers on the eight-seat SpaceShipOne will experience weightlessness and be able to float toward panoramic windows that, theoretically, will provide some awe-inspiring views.
The whole trip is two-and-a-half hours and everyone will receive a DVD chronicling the trip, as well as "a more philosophical view of our place in the universe," Whitehorn said.
The Independent also lists Paris Hilton and Morgan Freeman as parties interested in joining the 100-mile-high club, quoting Freeman as saying that he can't wait "to get up there in Branson's rocket."
How long the Oscar winner has to wait, if he is in fact interested, is still up in the air (so to speak). The first commercial rocket launched from Spaceport America in New Mexico, which Governor Bill Richardson is hoping will be the launching pad for the private space travel industry, failed to reach for the stars, instead going off course shortly after liftoff and petering out a few seconds into the flight.