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London Gatwick - Ryanair today announced that they will beat Richard Branson's 'Virgingalatic' in the race to be the first company to offer passenger trips to outer space.

'We won't be ripping off people with a quarter of a million pound ticket', said Ryanair spokesman, Ron Shark, 'Our normal one pound (2 dollars) a ticket will apply'. (Plus taxes, airport fees, fuel costs, bus to the plane, rental of stairs up to plane, etc, etc.)

Ryanair plan to offer the saving by not spending millions on developing a new rocket. Instead they will use their standard Boeing 737 with Go Faster stripes painted on the side to give the boost needed to get the plane into orbit. Silver foil will be wrapped around the plane's nose to combat the intense re-entry heat, supplied in a sponsorship deal with 'Alco'.

Passenger training will be carried out on the plane's take-off run up by showing episodes of 'Deep Sace Nine'. And to help calm nerves the Captain and Co-pilot will be known as "Kirk' and 'Spock' with stewards having names like 'Chekov' or 'Sulu'.

Once in space, passengers will be able to buy oxygen at around $3,000 a bottle. Tiny tablet like meals will sell for $1,000 and dry coffee powder for $200. Duty free will be available for sale, although NASA has yet to set the limit for the number of bottles.

'As the plane is going to go about 10 times higher than normal flights, we thought about 20 litres of booze and 10,000 fags would be a logical limit', said NASA Spokesmen Patrick Stewart.

Once their space flight is over, passengers will then carry on to their original destination, like Malaga, Kos or Cyprus to get pissed and give Brits more bad publicity.

ET was unavailable for comment as he is on the phone.