Blue Origin Sends Six Into Space
Blue Origin Launches 6 New Astronauts Into Space, SpaceRef
“The third crewed flight of a Blue Origin New Shepard launch system was conducted today. The “RSS First Step” left Earth just after 10:00 am ET for a quick flight above the Karman Line followed by a perfect landing of the booster and space capsule at the Texas launch site. On board were Dylan Taylor, Voyager Space; Michael Strahan, ABC; investor Evan Dick; Lane Ventures founder Lane Bess and his son Cameron Bess; and Laura Shepard Churchley, daughter of the first US astronaut Alan Shepard.”
The view from #NewShepard at apogee is something our #NS19 astronauts will never forget. Today’s flight featured a full capsule of six astronauts, each with their own window seat. pic.twitter.com/MOUT4YgnLC
— Blue Origin (@blueorigin) December 11, 2021
This capsule carried its first tourists on July 20th. The second group flew 85 days later, and then this group 59 days after that. Between the first two tourist flights there was also one non-crewed flight using a different capsule. It will be interesting to see what type of flight rate Blue Origin can achieve in 2022. Their previously stated long term goal is I think around 50 flights per year.
Meanwhile Virgin Galactic now doesn’t plan to start tourist flights until fourth quarter of next year, due to the long planned refurbishment of both the spaceship and the carrier aircraft. At this point it’s hard to imagine VG achieving any kind of meaningful flight rate even in 2023.
Although I have long felt that New Shepard is a better design for this purpose, I would not have predicted even as recently as a year ago that success in the suborbital tourist spaceflight market would be tipping so strongly in favor of Blue Origin.
50 flights with 6 passengers equals 300 seats a year. curious how much the seat prices are. They selling them one to one or is there a standard price? At 350k a seat would pull in 105 million not much considering.
Yawn for me…again. Fascinating.
What the moment is remembered for is not for this flight and the high-paying customers, congratulated in person by Jeff Bezos, but for his Amazon employees who tragically departed at the same time, and for whom Bezos apparently showed no concern.
Bezos no longer runs Amazon. He resigned from that job a year or two ago.
For what it’s worth, he’s retained the title of “Executive Chairman” of Amazon, although he has resigned from the position of CEO. I’ll let someone else guess what the roles and responsibilities of an executive chairman are.