In preparation for the flights, Blue Origin is expected to conduct the first passenger tests of the New Shepard launch system very soon. This comes, according to Space News, after Blue Origin’s Senior Vice President Rob Meyerson gave an update during his address at the Amazon Web Services Public Sector Summit, which took place in June 2018, in Washington DC.
“We plan to start flying our first test passengers soon…We expect to start selling tickets in 2019″, Meyerson said in his address. The executive did not elaborate on the cost of a ticket; however, conversations on Reddit suggest that the ticket price could range between $50,000 and $250,000 for a single seat.
Who is Blue Origin?
Blue Origin is a privately funded U.S. aerospace manufacturer and spaceflight services company. The company was formed in 2000 by Jeff Bezos for the purpose of developing technologies designed to enable private human access to space. Here the company has the goal of dramatically lowering costs and increasing the reliability of space flight technology.
2019 space flight
The first offering from Blue Origin in 2019 will be a sub-orbital spaceflight. This is a spaceflight where the spacecraft reaches space, although its trajectory intersects the atmosphere so that the craft does not complete one orbital revolution. This will be achieved in the New Shepard, a reusable launch system with a vertical-takeoff, vertical-landing crewed rocket. The rocket is powered using a Blue Origin BE-3 bipropellant rocket engine burning liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, providing 110,000 pounds of thrust. The capsule is designed to accommodate six people.
The capsule is designed to cross the Kármán line, which lies at an altitude of 100 kilometers representing the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and outer space. Here passengers will be able to unfasten their seatbelts and float weightlessly for a period of time.
The new announcements suggest that Blue Origin is more advanced, in terms of accepting space tourism than other high-profile enterprises such as Virgin Galactic.
