![]() "If it's one flight every few months, that's not enough to create an industry," he said. In addition to suborbital jaunts from Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin, Elon Musk’s company, SpaceX, is planning orbital tourism flights, beginning with the first mission to space with an all-civilian crew this year.Ĭaceres said all of these tourism ventures could become a lucrative sector of the commercial spaceflight industry, but it will likely take time. "For all practical purposes, the space tourism industry doesn't really exist right now," he said. Private citizens have paid for orbital flights to the International Space Station before, but all were launched aboard Soyuz rockets and capsules operated by the Russian Space Agency. This discrepancy has fueled competition between the rival billionaires, with Blue Origin officials suggesting that Virgin Galactic's flights don't actually reach suborbital space.īoth Branson's and Bezos' flight could jump-start the space tourism industry, which until now, has made slow progress over the last two decades, said Marco Caceres, a space industry analyst with the Teal Group Corporation. While the New Shepard capsule flies above the Kármán line, Virgin Galactic's craft reached an altitude of around 53 miles during Branson's flight. The edge of space is often defined by the so-called Kármán line, at an altitude of 62 miles. ![]() But unlike Virgin Galactic's Unity space plane, the New Shepard rocket and capsule fly autonomously, without pilots onboard.īlue Origin's capsule is also designed to reach a higher altitude than Virgin Galactic's vehicle. Blue Origin is hoping to begin operational flights with paying passengers in the near future, and while the company has not announced the price of individual tickets, they are expected to cost several hundreds of thousands of dollars.īezos' attempt to reach space comes after Branson took part in a risky test flight on July 11 aboard a rocket-powered vehicle developed by his private space company, Virgin Galactic. The launch is an important step for Blue Origin, which is banking on a future market for high-priced joyrides to space. Since it's a suborbital flight, the capsule will not enter into orbit around Earth, but will instead reach the edge of space, at an altitude of around 65 miles, where passengers will experience several minutes of weightlessness. The New Shepard rocket launches from a site in the West Texas desert, southeast of El Paso. The greatest adventure, with my best friend." "On July 20th, I will take that journey with my brother. "Ever since I was five years old, I've dreamed of traveling to space," Bezos wrote June 7 in an Instagram post announcing the flight. Rounding out the four-person crew is Bezos' brother, Mark. At 18, the Dutch teenager Oliver Daemen could become the youngest astronaut. Wally Funk, 82, is a former test pilot who was one of the Mercury 13 women who underwent training in the 1960s to demonstrate that women could meet NASA’s standards for its astronaut corps. Joining Bezos will be one passenger who stands to become the oldest person to reach space and another who would be the youngest. Several other milestones may be set on the trip. ![]()
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