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Blue Origin plans to start selling suborbital spaceflight tickets next year
Blue Origin expects to start flying people on its New Shepard suborbital vehicle "soon" and start selling tickets for commercial flights next year, a company executive said June 19.
Speaking at the Amazon Web Services Public Sector Summit here, as the keynote of a half-day track on earth and space applications, Blue Origin Senior Vice President Rob Meyerson offered a few updates on the development of the company's suborbital vehicle. "We plan to start flying our first test passengers soon," he said after showing a video of a previous New Shepard flight at the company's West Texas test site. All of the New Shepard flights to date have been without people on board, but the company has said in the past it would fly its personnel on the vehicle in later tests.
[...] Even the company's billionaire owner has not disclosed details. "We don't know the ticket price yet. We haven't decided," said Jeff Bezos in an on-stage interview May 25 at the National Space Society's International Space Development Conference in Los Angeles. That approach stands in stark contrast to Virgin Galactic, the other company in the advanced stages of development of a commercial suborbital vehicle capable of carrying people. Virgin Galactic started selling tickets more than a decade ago, even while SpaceShipTwo was still in the early stages of development. The company has approximately 700 customers who have paid at least a deposit.
Also at Quartz.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday June 26 2018, @03:02AM (3 children)
You keep harping on this. What's the problem with a little space tourism? If people are willing to pay, somebody should blast them into space.
They will target serious payloads starting with New Glenn:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Origin#Launch_vehicles [wikipedia.org]
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(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday June 26 2018, @03:12AM (2 children)
Hint: take my question on face value, no value judgement implied (I don't imply anything good or bad about the space tourism).
I'm asking: can you felow SN-ters imagine any other segment markets (than luxury/entertainment, which I see) that Bezos targets with this offer?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Tuesday June 26 2018, @03:19AM (1 child)
NASA launches suborbital sounding rockets for short-term telescopes and other experiments. If Shepard can be made to release a payload, then it could be used for that purpose.
And the German space agency will use New Shepard for microgravity experiments: http://spacenews.com/dlr-to-fly-experiments-on-blue-origins-new-shepard/ [spacenews.com]
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(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday June 26 2018, @03:38AM
Thanks.
And apologies for not being clear from the start what I was actually asking.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford