Photo: Blue Origin
Virgin Galactic’s competitor in the field of commercial space flights for the masses, Blue Origin, seems to be progressing much faster than the company set up by Richard Branson.
Virgin was a few years back close to sending private citizens to space, but the crash of the VSS Enterprise in 2014 sent the company spinning, and it is only beginning to regain its footing. The much younger Blue Origin supported by Jeff Bezos, however, is making huge steps towards making private space flights a reality.
Speaking at the Amazon Web Services Public Sector Summit in Washington, Blue Origin’s vice president Rob Meyerson said the company would beginning taking deposits for space flights in 2019. Unlike Virgin, which already sells tickets for $250,000, no pricing information has been offered by Blue Origin.
The first flights with tourists are expected to be made by using the New Shepard suborbital crewed rocket.
Named after the first American astronaut in space, the machine is made of a capsule and booster rocket that launch vertically from a launchpad. 150 seconds from launch, the booster engine cuts off, and the capsule glides into space. Both the booster and the capsule are intended to come back down to Earth safely.
When humans are allowed onboard, six of them will be able to fit in a space ten times larger than the one Alan Shepard had on his Mercury flight in 1961.
A second rocket-capsule combo is in the works, the New Glenn, named after the first American astronaut to orbit the Earth, John Glenn.
Both space machines will be powered by Blue Origin-built engines. The first is the BE-3, the first new liquid hydrogen-fueled rocket engine to be developed for production in America in over a decade. At full throttle, it is capable of generating the equivalent of more than 1 million horsepower.
The second is the BE-4, scheduled to fly on ULA’s Vulcan rocket in 2019. It will be five times more powerful than the BE-3.
Speaking at the Amazon Web Services Public Sector Summit in Washington, Blue Origin’s vice president Rob Meyerson said the company would beginning taking deposits for space flights in 2019. Unlike Virgin, which already sells tickets for $250,000, no pricing information has been offered by Blue Origin.
The first flights with tourists are expected to be made by using the New Shepard suborbital crewed rocket.
Named after the first American astronaut in space, the machine is made of a capsule and booster rocket that launch vertically from a launchpad. 150 seconds from launch, the booster engine cuts off, and the capsule glides into space. Both the booster and the capsule are intended to come back down to Earth safely.
When humans are allowed onboard, six of them will be able to fit in a space ten times larger than the one Alan Shepard had on his Mercury flight in 1961.
A second rocket-capsule combo is in the works, the New Glenn, named after the first American astronaut to orbit the Earth, John Glenn.
Both space machines will be powered by Blue Origin-built engines. The first is the BE-3, the first new liquid hydrogen-fueled rocket engine to be developed for production in America in over a decade. At full throttle, it is capable of generating the equivalent of more than 1 million horsepower.
The second is the BE-4, scheduled to fly on ULA’s Vulcan rocket in 2019. It will be five times more powerful than the BE-3.
Google News