SIR Richard Branson already has a waiting list of takers for a trip into space.

In a Virgin spaceship the three-hour or so flight might cost around £125,000.

Others, too, are poised for this particular space race. But where would the tourist spaceships blast off from?

Accustom yourself to the concept of a spaceport – tomorrow’s Heathrow – for a journey among the stars. Sensing a vast potential market, Britain’s business leaders, in the form of the Institute of Directors, are calling for Britain to take the lead in developing a spaceport, to serve the whole of Europe.

While you might fancy a space trip, your enthusiasm probably would not extend to welcoming the spaceport as a neighbour.

Worry not. No doubt aware that a proposed spaceport would trigger nimbyism to end all nimbyism, the business bosses have identified remote sites, in Scotland, Northern Ireland and the South West, which they believe offer the isolation and distance from existing air traffic routes to make them ideal for a spaceport.

And so, in our small islands, one more area of tranquillity is sacrificed. Can we afford this? For the promoters, an estimated £16bn market says we can. For some others among us, the prospect of Britain becoming Bedlam says no. Largely unknown, a commercial spaceport already exists – in America’s Mojave desert.

The US has the space for a spaceport. Any Briton prepared to pay £125,000 to tour space surely won’t quibble at having to pay a little more and cross the Atlantic first.

AMONG the images published to mark the diamond jubilee of the Queen’s reign, is a photo of her filming a tiger shoot in Nepal in 1961. Whether or not tigers survive in Nepal, the Queen certainly would not now attend a tiger shoot there or anywhere else, still less film one. The question is, would she want to? We just don’t know, do we?

WITHIN hours of the start of the round- Britain Olympic torch relay, used torches, whose holders can buy them for £200, were on sale on eBay. Makes you wonder how much the sellers really valued the “honour” and “privilege” of being selected for the relay. The organisers boobed by not banning any sale until after the Olympics – when all 8,000 torches could be available.

MEMORABLY once dubbed “a dead sheep” Lord Howe, the former Tory cabinet minister Sir Geoffrey Howe, has bizarrely returned to life. He complains that the Queen’s speech did not include a pledge to end immediately the “deeply confusing shambles” of our weights and measures – miles, pounds, pints – which he insists will “put us all to shame” in the eyes of overseas visitors to the Olympics. Nothing to do, of course, with his role as patron of the UK Metric Association. But let us suppose someone near and dear to Lord Howe gave birth to a baby weighing, say, 7lbs 6oz. Would he express it as 3.170 kilograms?

FROM time-to-time this column highlights an item that demonstrates the pointlessness of April Fool stories. A good example cropped up the other day: scientists have developed a laser method of erasing ink from paper. Future computer printers will have an ‘unprint’ button, allowing used paper to be re-used. The most creative newspaper brain would never have come up with that.