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Blue Origin Plans To Start Selling Suborbital Spaceflight Tickets Next Year (spacenews.com)
Blue Origin expects to start flying people on its New Shepard suborbital vehicle "soon" and start selling tickets for commercial flights next year, a company executive said June 19, according to a report on SpaceNews.com. From the report: Speaking at the Amazon Web Services Public Sector Summit here, as the keynote of a half-day track on earth and space applications, Blue Origin Senior Vice President Rob Meyerson offered a few updates on the development of the company's suborbital vehicle. "We plan to start flying our first test passengers soon," he said after showing a video of a previous New Shepard flight at the company's West Texas test site. All of the New Shepard flights to date have been without people on board, but the company has said in the past it would fly its personnel on the vehicle in later tests. He also offered a timetable for selling tickets. "We expect to start selling tickets in 2019," he said, but did not disclose a price. Further reading:
Gizmodo.
Only if you're rich.
Otherwise, fuck you.
And why should it be any other way?
I am probably not going to risk my life on these...
Maybe I would buy a few tickets for my rivals.
5 out of 6 people enjoy Russian Roulette & 6 out of 7 Dwarfs are not Happy
The whole FA talks about "selling tickets" next year, but says absolutely nothing about when the purchasers would actually be able to USE them...
Not going to start holding my breath yet.
Which "soon" is this (in order of fast to never)?
It's cool and all, but you shouldn't be so easily bowled over by a premium amusement park ride for rich bastards that's about as far from making humanity a spacefaring species as the first caveman to run down a hill holding a banana tree leaf over his head was to achieving supersonic flight.
Yuri Gagarin has been there, done that, and got the T-shirt, almost 60 years ago.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Trump may well farm out the Space Force's space travel to an enterprise that's not Bezos related. And if Elon Musk's SpaceX is the one chosen, I wouldn't be surprised. It would be a 3rd degree burn to Bezos. Especially after that $130 million dollar contract SpaceX won from the USAF. So, maybe Blue Origin's announcement is a foray into the political quagmire, saying they are still economically viable, and that they can still make a buck in space even without a contract from Uncle Sam.
When commercial air flight was first starting out, it was also only the rich that could afford it, but that has obviously changed. It seems reasonable that over time the same thing will happen to space flights.
Is the Blue Origin spacecraft better designed than Amazon web pages?
Being more clear: I should say that I don't see any reason to be particularly negative about Jeff Bezos as a person. It is, however, my opinion that he is not managing Amazon sufficiently. Three examples:
1) While a customer is reviewing a product, Amazon tries to sell other products.
2) There are a lot of sellers on Amazon who try to take advantage of customers.
3) Often products are presented with insufficient explanation.
Question: Will Blue Origin, a sub-orbital spaceflight company, be better managed than Amazon? If passengers on Blue Origin want to avoid death, Blue Origin must be extremely well managed. (Blue Origin craft don't have nearly enough power to go into orbit.)
Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post and it has done well: How Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos reinvented The Washington Post, the 140-year-old newspaper he bought for $250 million. (Paywalled.)
However, I don't see the kind of extremely detailed management in activities connected with Jeff Bezos that is necessary for safe spaceflight.
Quote from that Business Insider article: "Bezos liked the opportunity so much that he didn't do any due diligence and just signed the first $250 million offer sheet that came from Graham."