The first regular tourist flights in space may already be in 2019

The two most advanced private companies in the space tourism market say they are just months away from their first flights into space with customers on board, although each of them remains cautious and refrains from advancing a specific date.

Virgin Galactic, founded by British billionaire Richard Branson, and Blue Origin, by the more discreet billionaire Jeff Bezos, boss of Amazon, race to be the first to finish the tests.

Both companies have radically different technologies. For both, the pbadengers will not go into orbit around the Earth: their experience in weightlessness will only last a few minutes, unlike the few space tourists who paid tens of millions of dollars to travel aboard a Soyuz and of the International Space Station (ISS) in the 2000s.

From $ 250,000

For a much cheaper ticket ($ 250,000 at Virgin, unknown at Blue Origin) these new tourists will be propelled to several tens of kilometers of altitude, before falling back on Earth. By comparison, the ISS is in orbit at 400 km. The goal is to approach or exceed the imaginary line marking the beginning of space, the Karman line, 100 km, or the line preferred by the US military, 50 miles (80 km). At this altitude, the sky becomes darker and the bend of the Earth is clear.

Virgin Galactic, six pbadengers and two pilots will settle aboard SpaceShipTwo VSS Unity, which looks like a private jet. The VSS Unity will be attached under a carrier plane, dubbed WhiteKnightTwo. Once dropped at an altitude of 15,000 m, the ship will light its rocket, heading for the sky. There pbadengers will float in weightlessness for several minutes. The descent will be slowed by a system of "empennage": the fins of the tail of the ship will pivot and the ship will arch before returning to normal. Then the aircraft will land on an airstrip from Virgin's "spaceport" in the New Mexico desert. In a May 29 test in the Mojave desert, the ship reached an altitude of 35 km. In October 2014, Virgin's ship broke in flight due to a pilot error, killing one of the two pilots. The tests resumed with a new device. Virgin has reached an agreement to open a second spaceport in Italy, at Taranto-Grottaglie Airport.

Richard Branson said in May, on BBC Radio 4, that he hoped to be himself one of the first pbadengers in the next twelve months. About six hundred and fifty customers are on the waiting list, says Virgin to AFP.

Blue Origin's "Traditional" Rocket

Blue Origin has developed a system that resembles traditional rockets: the New Shepard. Six pbadengers will be seated in the seats of a "capsule", a cabin attached to the top of an 18 m high vertical rocket.

After launch, which will propel the capsule to near Mach 3, this one will detach and continue its trajectory a few kilometers to the sky. In a test on April 29, the capsule reached 107 km. During this time, the rocket will come down again … and will land, slowly, vertically. After several minutes of weightlessness, during which pbadengers can get up and look out through large portholes, the capsule will fall back to Earth, slowed by three large parachutes and retrofuses. Rob Meyerson said in June that the first inhabited tests would take place "soon".