Jeff Bezos plans to charge at least $ 200,000 for space travel – sources

Jeff Bezos plans to charge at least $ 200,000 for space travel – sources

SEATTLE: The Jeff Bezos' rocket company predicts Potential passengers and the aerospace industry have been eager to learn the cost of a ticket on the Blue Origin New Shepard spacecraft. , to find out if it is affordable and if the company can generate enough demand to make profit on space tourism.
The company executives, founded by Bezos, founder of Amazon.com Inc. in 2000, said at a conference last month that they planned theft of money. test with passengers on the New Shepard soon, and to start selling tickets next year.
The company, based about 32 km south of Seattle, made public the general design of the vehicle launch a rocket and passenger capsule acable – but was limited on the state of production and prices tickets.
Blue Origin representatives did not respond to requests for comments on its programs and pricing strategy. Bezos said in May that ticket prices had not been decided yet.
A Blue Origin employee with first-hand knowledge of the pricing plan indicated that the company would start selling tickets of approximately $ 200,000 to $ 300,000. A second employee said the tickets would cost at least $ 200,000. They both spoke under cover of anonymity because the pricing strategy is confidential.
The New Shepard is designed to autonomously fly six passengers more than 100 km above the Earth into a suborbital space high enough to feel a few minutes of weightlessness. and see the curvature of the planet before the pressurized capsule returns to the ground beneath the parachutes.
The capsule features six observation windows Blue Origin said are almost three times as high as those of a Boeing 747 airliner.
performed eight test flights at takeoff and at the New Shepard vertical landing from its launch pad in Texas, but none with passengers on board. Two flights included a test dummy that the company calls "Skywalker Manikin".
The company will make the first test in the space of its capsule exhaust system, which propels the crew to safety if the booster explodes.
Blue Origin, whose Latin motto means "step by step, fiercely", is working to make civil spaceflight an important niche in the global space economy, alongside satellite services and communications projects. government exploration, which is worth more than $ 300 billion a year.
Bezos, the richest person in the world with a fortune of $ 112 billion, is competing with Richard Branson and Elon Musk, the general manager of Tesla. Virgin Galactic claims to have sold about 650 tickets on its own planned space travel, but has not set a departure date for the flights. The company charges $ 250,000 per ticket, in accordance with the prices offered by Blue Origin.
SpaceX, founded by Musk in 2002, claims that its ultimate goal is to allow people to live on other planets.
Although Blue Origin did not disclose its operating costs per flight, Teal Group aeronautical analyst Marco Caceres estimated that each flight could be expensive. close about $ 10 million. With six passengers per trip, that would mean losing millions of dollars per launch, at least in the beginning.
Three sources indicated that Blue's first passengers would likely include their own employees, although the company has not yet selected them.