The six passengers, including a Blue Origin engineer and five paying customers, are scheduled to depart Thursday after 9:30 a.m. ET aboard their Blue Origin New Shepard capsule.
Those interested in catching the action – which is expected to be similar to Blue Origin’s three previous suborbital excursions – can tune into Blue Origin’s webcast Thursday morning.
Powered by a 60-foot rocket, they will soar to more than three times the speed of sound, or more than 2,000 miles per hour. Your capsule will jump past the Kármán Line at 100 kilometers (or 62 miles), that is widely recognized as the altitude at which space begins. And at the climax of the flight, they experience a few minutes of weightlessness and an expansive view of Earth from their window.
How much the trip cost the five paying customers is not clear. Blue Origin has not publicly announced a firm price per seat, although it did auction a ticket for $28 million. But that was for a seat alongside Bezos himself, and the auction winner didn’t go. (It’s scheduled to fly later this year, however.) Blue Origin’s direct competitor, Virgin Galactic, is selling seats for $450,000.
That flight was supposed to include Saturday Night Live star Pete Davidson, but it canceled the mission after Blue Origin announced a flight schedule change earlier this month. The company cited the need for additional ground testing for the New Shepard missile as the reason for the delay.
Gary Lai, who has been with Blue Origin for 18 years and holds several patents related to the design of the New Shepard rocket, flew in Davidson’s place and was the only non-paying customer on the flight. Lai’s crew members included Marty Allen, an investor and former CEO of a party supply store; Jim Kitchen, entrepreneur and economics professor; George Nield, a former deputy administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration Office of Commercial Space Transportation; Marc Hagle, an Orlando real estate developer, and his wife, Sharon Hagle, who founded a space-focused nonprofit.
what it all means
Business in space — largely led by SpaceX — is booming. From building cheaper rockets and developing new uses for satellites to unveiling futuristic space hotels, the industry has attracted record levels of investment. After years of quiet development, Blue Origin’s space tourism rocket made its manned launch debut with Bezos last year, flying alongside a space community hero, Wally Funk, as well as his brother Mark Bezos and a paying customer. Since then, Blue Origin has made headlines for flying other household names, including Star Trek star William Shatner and Good Morning America host Michael Strahan, on two consecutive flights.
Blue Origin’s goal is to make these suborbital spaceflights a mainstay of pop culture by offering a 10-minute supersonic joyride to invited guests – who have so far mostly been celebrities – and anyone else who can afford it.
Blue Origin is the first company to begin offering regular suborbital space tourism flights. Notably, its main competitor, Virgin Galactic, had its first crewed flight — which included founder Richard Branson — before Bezos’ flight last July. But Virgin Galactic has one more passenger flight to follow that flight after it was later revealed that the company’s spaceplane had deviated from its intended trajectory. The company now says it is going through unrelated technology upgrades and may return to flight later this year.
SpaceX is the only private company offering trips to orbit. The company completed the first-ever all-civilian flight into orbit last September, taking a billionaire and three of his chosen crew members on a three-day journey. And next week, the company plans to take four paying customers on a flight to the International Space Station, which orbits about 200 miles above Earth. Blue Origin has plans to build a rocket powerful enough to reach orbit called the New Glenn. And with news that Russia may stop selling rocket engines to the United States, those plans are more urgent than ever. The engines that Blue Origin intends to use for the New Glenn, the BE-4, will also be used in a forthcoming launch vehicle being developed by United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing dedicated to major national launches Security in the US is responsible. ULA currently relies on Russian RD-180 engines. Its new rocket, powered by US-made BE-4 engines, is scheduled to make its debut this year.
Blue Origin had no specific updates on BE-4 when reached for comment.