During a first-ever meeting with the media at his aerospace firm’s headquarters, secretive Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos revealed that he hopes to begin manned test flights in 2017, followed by actual space tourism flights the following year, various media outlets are reporting.
Amazon’s Bezos founded Blue Origin in September 2000 but never gave reporters access to the company’s headquarters in Washington. On Tuesday, he led 11 members of the media on a four-hour tour of his company’s operations, providing insight into their future plans along the way, according to the New York Times.
Next up for Blue Origin will be a third launch for their reusable New Shepard spacecraft, which in November traveled to the edge of space and made a return trip back in January. Provided that the next test fight goes well, he may begin taking space tourists in groups of six on short trips to experience microgravity in approximately two years time, he told the newspaper.
He and his engineers also showed off a new engine, the BE-4, which is under development, the Times said. A full version is scheduled to be completed and ready for testing by the end of 2016, he told reporters. The 12-foot-tall BE-4 is expected to produce 550,000 pounds of thrust and will be fueled by liquefied natural gas, Bezos had previously told reporters.
Blue Origin hopes to launch 100 flight per year; ticket cost TBD
Blue Origin has not yet started taking deposits, according to the Associated Press, meaning that there is no way to tell whether or not the venture will be a financial success. For his part, Bezos said that he is confident that his childhood dream will eventually be a profitable business.
The Amazon founder also declined to say how much money he had invested into Blue Origin, but the high-tech equipment and the approximately 600 employees required to keep things operational add up to “a very significant number.” He also said that safety was his firm’s primary concern, and that he hoped to eventually launch as many as 100 suborbital flights per year.
Bezos also promised that this would not be the last time that he met with reporters, and that that his reticence was not due to a desire to be secretive, but to avoid making promises or claims that his company could not live up to. “Space is really easy to overhype,” he told the Times. Even so, he promised to give more details about Blue Origin’s planned larger rocket later on this year, and said that the media would be invited to Texas to see a future New Shepard test flight.
He also told Reuters that the company had not yet determined what it would charge passengers for their trip to the edge of space, but promised that it would be competitive with the prices that their rivals charge. Virgin Galactic, the news organization said, sells seats on its six-passenger SpaceShipTwo for $250,000, while XCOR Aerospace charges $100,000 for a person to fly with a pilot on their two-person Lynx space plane.
—–
Image credit: Blue Origin
Comments