By Kenneth Chang The headquarters of Blue Origin, the secretive rocket company in an industrial park in Kent, Washington, is anonymous, with not even a sign at the road to announce the occupants.
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Blue Origin wants to put a human pilot in its New Shepard spacecraft in 2017, founder Jeff Bezos said on Tuesday.
Jeff Bezos at Blue Origin’s launch facility in West Texas. “Thank you for coming”.
Mr Bezos does not care about being the first private company to offer space tourism to the masses. Thus it is still unclear whether the interest in space travel will turn into actual sales. A second ship will undergo two test flights, with Blue Origin now producing its next two vehicles, now involving windows for its paying flight customers. He talked garrulously, his speech punctured by loud laughs. He described an image on a wall in the company’s central area, which showed two tortoises holding an hourglass and gazing upward at a stylised image of the planets and cosmos.
Blue Origin will send tourists, six at a time, about 60 miles above the Earth. “You can do the steps quickly, but you can’t skip any steps”, Bezos said.
Going to the edge of space will be the next tourism hot spot. Passengers will experience weightlessness and each will receive an HD video of their trip when they return. The conclusion: There is not.
Bezos has been engaged in a billionaires’ battle over space during the past few years. The spaceship is expected to start test flights soon. “I won a lottery ticket called Amazon.com”. That’s far down the line, more of Bezos dream vision than the company’s real plans. Still, nearly no one knew what he was doing.
“It’s very gratifying that the world’s premier launch companies are choosing our engines”, Bezos said.
Blue Origin also is working on rocket engines for United Launch Alliance, a partnership of Lockheed-Martin and Boeing, and for Orbital ATK. For now, Blue Origin’s business plans fall in three categories. New Shepard has already been tested but without humans inside.
Bezos told reporters that reusing rockets will allow the company to launch dozens of times each year.
Blue Origin will eventually launch up to six space tourists at a time using a 60-foot rocket with a special “New Shepard” capsule on top.
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Blue Origin has not yet settled on a price for rides, but Bezos said it will be competitive with what other companies, such as Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, are charging for similar flights. “Space is really easy to overhype”, he said.
