![]() Entrepreneur and adventurer Richard Branson, whose company Virgin Galactic has been planning for decades to launch customers into space from a carrier plane (à la Stratolaunch), has reportedly responded to Bezos’ announcement by speeding up his company’s vertical road map-so Branson himself can be a passenger, on a flight taking off during the July 4 weekend. Still, one imagines he’s feeling good about being the first person to build his own rocket to take him to space. Blue Origin plans to hop from suborbital to orbital flights (a big hop), then to the moon and points beyond. Since he was a teenager, he has been convinced that it is the destiny of the human species to reside in extraterrestrial colonies, but to get there, space travel must become routine. But his own thrill ride is just a side benefit of pursuing his ultimate goal: creating the infrastructure for humans to live in space. You can argue that no one has paid more to dip into space than Bezos, who has invested billions in Blue Origin. Such are the options of a Microsoft billionaire. Once Blue Origin has an established track record, he says he might pay for three seats, giving his preteen daughters a glimpse of space travel. “Now, it's going to be more of a touristy thing.” He hastened to add that this is a wonderful development, with all those new quasi-astronauts sharing their experiences with those of us cooling our heels on the earthen crust.īut Simonyi, who survived a rough battle with Covid early in the pandemic, won’t be bidding for the open seat on New Shepard, at least not this time around. “I’m so happy that I was able to do the flight when it was still kind of this romantic idea,” he says. Since each trip cost “tens of millions of dollars,” that’s saying something. To Seattle-based software pioneer Charles Simonyi, the only two-time space tourist (he traveled with the Russians to the International Space Station in 20), the adventure was worth the cost. There are enough takers to form waitlists. “Because of basic physics of what you do on a spaceflight, this is going to remain the realm of high-net-worth individuals,” says Tom Shelly, the president of Space Adventures-a company that has arrangements with the Russian space program and SpaceX to send super-wealthy civilians into orbit. Though Bezos wants to dramatically bring down the cost of space flights with reusable parts, for the foreseeable future only the rich will be able to pay their way up and down. And indeed, this week Jeff Bezos said that he would be part of Blue’s human payload on July 20, riding his New Shepard rocket past the theoretical borderline between Earth and outer space, roughly 60 miles up, known as the Karman Line. “I’ve been offered many times, believe me.” Then came two separate announcements that shared a July 2021 target date: Bezos’ formal step-down from the CEO post at Amazon, and Blue Origin’s first flight with people on board. “If I just wanted to go to space, I would buy a ticket from the Russians,” he told me then. ![]() ![]() (The rumored price was $250k.) Bezos himself would wait. The plan was to do a test flight with professional pilots in 2019 and then send up paying customers. ![]() When I spoke to Bezos about this, also in 2018, Blue Origin was supposedly getting close to sending people for a quick shot into space-an 11-minute joyride that would begin on a reusable rocket booster and end by parachuting down to the Texas desert only yards from the launch pad. ![]()
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