SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) – British entrepreneur Richard Branson said Wednesday a deal to locate the headquarters of Branson’s Virgin Galactic at a planned $225 million state-built spaceport in southern New Mexico will make the state “the launch pad for the new space industry.”

“We’re about to embark on a wonderful adventure … we’re going where no one has gone before. There’s no model to follow, nothing to copy,” Branson said at a news conference with Gov. Bill Richardson to kick off the deal.

Branson’s company plans to send 50,000 customers into space in the first 10 years of operation from the world’s first purpose-built private spaceport.

“This investment in economic development and high-wage jobs will create a new industry that will transform the economy in southern New Mexico,” the governor said.

Branson, who cited New Mexico’s rich aviation and space history, said: “Of all the projects I’ve worked on in my life and all the businesses I’ve started, this is by far and away the most exciting.”

New Mexico officials announced in September that a Connecticut-based company, UP Aerospace Inc., will use the site for a series of commercial suborbital space flights. The first launch, scheduled for March 27, will be a 21-foot rocket with experimental and commercial payloads.

Virgin Galactic officials said 100 people already have paid $200,000 apiece to fly into space.

They include actress Victoria Principal, who told the news conference she looked forward to being on the first civilian flight of Virgin Galactic, perhaps as soon as 2008.

“To me, Virgin Galactic and New Mexico makes a perfect marriage,” she said.

Virgin Galactic officials said the safety-conscious company likely would launch 50 or 60 test flights before it began taking paying passengers.

Paid flights will be 2 hours with about six minutes of weightlessness, during which tethered passengers can leave their seats and float around while viewing the Earth through huge windows. Passengers would be required to take 3 days of training in advance, Galactic officials said.

The $225 million in public funding would come from a combination of federal, state and local money, Richardson said.

The governor said he plans to ask the state Legislature in January for $100 million – to be generated from severance tax bonds – over three years to pay for spaceport infrastructure such as runways, roads, power lines, launch pads, a weather station and water and sewer systems.

The state funding – $33 million in 2006 and 2007 and $34 million in 2008 – would be released as specific milestones are met.

The state also would contribute an additional $35 million, much of that from its transportation budget, leaving $90 million of the $225 million to be raised from the federal government and local communities.

Voters in southern New Mexico will be asked to approve local option gross receipts taxes for the local contribution, said Economic Development Secretary Rick Homans.

Homans said building the spaceport would lay the foundation “for a whole new industry.”

“New Mexico will be the launch pad for America’s second space age, centered on private sector innovations and personal space flight,” Homans said.

A study by an aerospace industry consulting firm, Futron, indicated the annual economic impact of the spaceport in 2020 could be more than $750 million in total revenue and more than 3,500 jobs – including all service and manufacturing activities and tourist-related spending.

The spaceport could be under construction in 2007 and open in late 2009 or early 2010; the company would send its initial flights up from Mojave, Calif.

“When the spaceport is built, we look forward to basing our world headquarters and U.S. operations and a fleet of up to five spaceships and a launch aircraft at the new facility,” Branson said.

The colorful billionaire tycoon whose Virgin Group began as a record label formed Virgin Galactic after SpaceShipOne, designed by Burt Rutan and funded by Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen, became the first privately manned rocket to reach space last year and went on to win the $10 million Ansari X Prize.

Virgin Galactic has made a deal with Rutan to build five spacecraft.

According to the company, as many as 38,000 people from 126 countries have put down deposits for a seat on one of the manned commercial flights.

The Virgin Galactic facility – most of it underground – would be part of the Southwest Regional Spaceport complex planned for a 27-square-mile site about 45 miles northeast of Las Cruces and 25 miles southeast of Truth or Consequences.

It’s near the White Sands Missile Range – where, in 1945, the world’s first atomic bomb was tested and the U.S. launched its first rocket.

A concrete slab will be poured for a launching pad, temporary buildings erected for assembly of the rocket and for fuel storage, and a weather station will be established, at a cost to the state of about $100,000, officials said. UP Aerospace plans three launches in 2006, 12 in 2007 and up to 30 in 2008.

Another British company, Starchaser Industries Ltd., has opened a Las Cruces office and says it plans to manufacture and test rockets and other space vehicles at the spaceport.