Blue Origin's flight tickets will reportedly be sold from next year and one seat onboard could be priced as much as $200,000
Space…The final frontier. Everyone wants to go there, but not everyone can, and if Amazon chief Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin has its way, space travel for us mortals will just be like that expensive european holiday we can't afford.
Last month, we heard that Bezos' space travel company Blue Origin, was aiming to sell tickets for its commercial flights to space by next year. There was no information as to when the company’s vision of sending people into suborbital space will become a reality.
Now, Reuters, citing sources familiar with the company’s plans, says that Blue Origin could charge between $200,000 (1.36 crores approx) to $300,000 (Rs 2.05 crores approx) for booking a seat on its first trip to space. The tickets are said to go on sale next year.
The company already announced that it has planned test flights with passengers on the New Shepard soon. General design of the vehicle depicting the launch rocket and a detachable passenger capsule were also made public recently. Additionally, as Reuters has pointed out, the company might incur losses in millions per flight at first, if the tickets are priced as reported. The Shepard system is capable of transporting only six passengers to spend around three minutes in a microgravity environment, over 62 miles (100 Km) above the earth’s surface. Each of these flights is said to cause the company around $10 million (Rs 68.4 crores approx) in losses, a Teal Group aerospace analyst told Reuters.
Blue Origin's "New Shepard" is a fully reusable vertical takeoff and vertical landing (VTVL) space vehicle. It houses a pressurised capsule on top of a booster, which can be reused at least 25 times, says the company. The capsule is fitted with six observation windows and these are said to be nearly three times as tall as those on a Boeing 747 jetliner. Blue Origin has completed eight test flights of the New Shepard VTVL from its launch pad in Texas, but without any passengers. A test dummy, the company calls "Mannequin Skywalker", was included in two of these flights.
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