Blue Origin will start selling tickets to space tourists next year.
Once in space, the capsule with the crew and passengers is separated from the starting stage. Then the stage returns to Earth, and then the capsule goes there too, which is lowered with the help of parachutes and special engines
. Blue Origin is confident that in the near future it will be able to realize its plans for sending space tourists to near-Earth space. In fact, ticket sales will begin next year, as reported by Rob Meyerson, the head of the company. He spoke about this at the Amazon Web Services Public Sector Summit event.
As planned, the New Shepard rocket will carry tourists into space., suborbital "taxi" that can detach from the surface of the Earth for a relatively short time. After the flight, the first step returns back to exactly the same place from which it took off. Capsule with crew and passengers lands nearby. "We plan to start sending our passengers into space in the near future," said Meyerson. Before you speak, the head of the company showed a video of the rocket flight, the work of which was checked last time several months ago. Until now, the New Shepard has been launched without people on board, but trials should begin soon with the team.
If all goes well, the tickets will begin to sell in 2019, as mentioned above. So far, the company is not very actively working to attract potential passengers, which may indicate that all the tests have not yet been completed and it is too early to talk about the final flights. This is confirmed by the words of Bob Smith, the executive director of Blue Origin: “We continue to check all systems in order to make sure that the current configuration is stable and we can fly. As soon as we are sure that everything is fine, we will immediately inform you about the rates and the rocket flight schedule. ”
It is interesting that Jeff Bezos does not say how much a ticket for a flight into space can cost - simply because the management itself has not yet decided on the size of the check. “We do not know yet the cost of the ticket. So far we have not decided what it should be, ”Bezos said in an interview he gave on May 25 at a conference in Los Angeles.
Of course, companies should hurry, because competitors who plan to do the same thing as Blue Origin are quite a lot. For example, Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic company again began to work actively. The way in which Virgin plans to send passengers into space is somewhat different from the methods it decided to use in Blue Origin. But we are talking about all the same suborbital flights without access to ordinary space. The absence of Earth's attraction passengers will feel a maximum of a few minutes, after which they will have to return home. Despite the fact that the vehicles of this company are still being developed, 700 people have already purchased tickets.
As for Blue Origin, this company launched its New Shsepard rocket eight times already. The last launch was implemented on April 29 of this year. The exact time of the next flight is not known, but one of the managers of the company's space program announced that the launch would take place in the summer, without specifying in which month.
The first launch was carried out in April 2015, then the rocket successfully detached from the Earth, and during the flight a capsule was separated for a team that landed with the help of parachutes. However, there was a technical problem that caused the failure of the module with a jet engine, which should ensure a soft landing of the capsule to the Earth. But after a while the problem was solved.
Meyerson has served as vice president of a space company since the beginning of this year. Now, among other things, he is engaged in the execution and parallel flight programs. For example, Blue Origin decided to create a lunar land. According to Meyerson and his colleagues, now there is no more important goal than the exploration of other planets and satellites of the Solar system, and the current activity of the company ultimately should contribute to solving this issue.
However, it is not clear that the project will begin to be implemented after a suborbital rocket starts to regularly run between the “sky and the earth”. Perhaps the company’s plan does exist, but it has not yet introduced it to the general public.