The six passengers, including a Blue Origin engineer and five paying customers, are scheduled to board the Blue Origin New Shepard capsule Thursday after 9:30 a.m. ET.
Those interested in capturing the event – which is expected to look like Blue Origin’s three previous sub-orbital flights – can tune in to Blue Origin webcast Thursday morning.
Powered by a 60-foot rocket, they will rise to more than three times the speed of sound, or more than 2,000 miles per hour. Their capsule will cross the Karman Line at an altitude of 100 kilometers (or 62 miles), which isIt is widely recognized as the height at which outer space begins. And at the climax of the trip, they will experience a few minutes of weightlessness and, from their window, sweeping views of the Earth.
It is not clear how much the trip cost the five paying customers. Blue Origin hasn’t publicly revealed a fixed price point for each seat, though it auctioned off a single ticket for $28 million. But that was for a seat to ride alongside Bezos himself, and it didn’t end up being the auction winner. (he is Scheduled to fly later this yearhowever.) Blue Origin’s direct competitor, Virgin Galactic, sells seats for $450,000.
This trip was scheduled to include Saturday Night Live star Pete Davidson, but pulled out of the mission after Blue Origin announced a schedule change earlier this month. The company indicated the need for additional ground tests on the New Shepard missileas a reason for the delay.
Gary Lay, who has been with Blue Origin for 18 years and holds several patents related to the design of the New Shepard rocket, flew Davidson’s place and was the only customer who didn’t pay for the flight. Among his crewmates was Lay Marty Allen, an investor and Former CEO of Party Supply Store; Jim Kitchen, businessman and business professor; George Nield Former Co-Director for the Federal Aviation Administration’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation; Mark Hagel, Ann Orlando real estate developerand his wife, Sharon Hagel, who founded a non-profit organization focused on space.
After years of quiet development, the Blue Origin space tourism rocket took off for the first time last year with Bezos, flying alongside Space Society heroine Wally Funk, as well as his brother Mark Bezos and a. Customer pays.
Since then, Blue Origin has made headlines to fly other well-known names on two consecutive flights, including the Star Trek star. William Shatner And good morning host America Michael Strahan.
Blue Origin’s goal is to make these suborbital spaceflights a mainstay of pop culture, enabling a 10-minute supersonic entertainment flight for invited guests — who were hitherto celebrities — and anyone else who could afford it.
Blue Origin is the first company to begin offering regular sub-orbital space tourism flights. Its main competitor, Virgin Galactic, had made its first manned flight – which included its founder Richard Branson – before Bezos’ flight last July. But Virgin Galactic did not follow up that flight with another passenger flight after it was later revealed that the company’s space plane had moved off its scheduled flight path. The company now says it’s undergoing unrelated technical updates and may be back in flight later this year.
SpaceX is the only private company to offer flights into orbit. The company completed its first-ever civilian flight into orbit last September, taking the billionaire and three select colleagues on a three-day excursion. Next week, the company plans to take Four paying customers On a trip to the International Space Station, which orbits about 200 miles above Earth.
Blue Origin has plans to build a rocket powerful enough to reach orbit, called New Glenn. In view of the file News that Russia may stop selling missile engines to the United StatesThese plans are more urgent than ever. The Blue Origin engines it plans to use in New Glenn, BE-4, will be used in an upcoming launch vehicle designed by the United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing responsible for critical US national security launches. ULA is currently based on Russian RD-180 engines.Its new missile with US-made BE-4 engines is scheduled to be launched for the first time this year.
Blue Origin did not have specific updates to the BE-4 when reached for comment.
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