Blue Origin Takes a HUGE Step Forward for Space Tourism

How much would you pay to go into space?

While humanity may be generations off from colonizing distant, uninhabited lands, there are a multitude of companies working towards recreational space travel. One such company is Blue Origin, founded by Amazon’s own Jeff Bezos. Blue Origin has been testing rockets intended to usher passengers into space, much like Elon Musk’s SpaceX, and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic. And it seems like it’s getting close.

A Question of Reusability

It’s not that it’s difficult to get people and things into space. While catastrophic failures are still a possibility, a number of governments have been able to launch many successful space missions. The issue is reusability. Government-funded space programs don’t need to worry about profit. Billionaires do.

When it comes to space tourism and recreational space travel, companies need to find a way to create reusable transport: transport that can survive multiple exits and reentries into the earth’s atmosphere. That’s a hard sell, but they’re working on it.

Traditionally, manned space vessels have essentially fallen apart entirely upon reentry. They are designed to protect a single capsule containing people: everything else is negligible. For a commercial enterprise, this would be like disassembling a jet every time it landed, and it isn’t feasible at scale.

Blue Origin Takes Another Step Towards Tourism

In May of 2019, Blue Origin sent its Shephard rocket on an 11th test flight, which went outside of the prior boundaries of space and was able to successfully return. This is a huge step towards reusability and commercial space travel.

Presently, the goal for these space tourist systems aren’t to actually get anywhere off world. Instead, they’re designed to take passengers to the very boundaries of space, where they can escape the earth’s gravitational field. Passengers are then (hopefully) safely returned. Most trips are less than fifteen minutes long, though they may cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

But this is only a first step towards true space travel, and many believe that commercial space travel may be able to quickly eclipse government-funded space travel once it becomes profitable enough. While governments must secure funding and vote on funding for their space initiatives, commercial enterprises will be able to fund their own initiatives.

Watch the latest launch yourself:

The Billionaire Space Race: the Giants Have Come to Play

The current space race is between a handful of billionaires each with their own companies. Bezos has Blue Origin, but Musk has SpaceX, Richard Branson has Virgin Galactic, Paul Allen has Vulcan Aerospace, and Yuri Milner has Breakthrough Starshot.

Of these, Bezos, Musk, and Branson have emerged as primary players. All three are fighting to achieve reliable transport into space first, and this competition between the richest men in the world is what’s fueling innovation and progress. In fact, it’s very much a libertarian ideal: the idea that simply having the right people with enough money can lead to greater progress than innovation-by-committee.

Yet there are also concerns about how this emerging market will be controlled and regulated. A recent explosion by SpaceX has been met with silence, and only labeled as an “anomaly.” Space debris is already becoming a very real complication for space travel and space exploits, with satellites now having to dodge a growing field of “space trash.”

Who is Winning the New Space Race?

Blue Origin and SpaceX have been fighting visibly and aggressively throughout the pursuit of space tourism, often coordinating to spite each other. Yet early in the year, Virgin Galactic was the company successfully bringing a passenger into space.

Bezos’ company has seen some substantial improvements in its launches, and while SpaceX tends to hit the headlines more often, it’s also had more visible disasters and destruction: Blue Origin appears to be taking a more cautious approach. No human passengers have been sent on the Blue Origin or SpaceX rockets yet, but experiments have been loaded and returned to earth.

Musk believes that people are going to be going into space within the year, and he’s often said that he wants to be one of the first. Similarly, Bezos had previously claimed that passengers would be going into space in late 2018, and that commercial tickets would be on sale in 2019 and Virgin Galactic is already gearing up for sales.

Whoever wins the space race, there is a question of profitability. Traditionally, space travel has been a loss leader for other innovations and inventions: space travel pushes the boundaries of engineering, and consequently leads to new emerging technologies. Companies enmeshed in the race towards space tourism may very well find this to be true, just as NASA has in the past.

Regards,

Ethan Warrick
Editor
Wealth Authority


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