TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - Jeff Bezos’s private space company Blue Origin announced that it plans to sell suborbital space shuttle tickets to the future space tourists starting next year, Gizmodo reported this weekend.
No price is given, but the company said it expects to conduct the first passenger test of the New Shepard launch system "soon".
As reported by Jeff Foust in Space News, Blue Origin Senior Vice President Rob Meyerson made the announcement in his keynote speech at the Amazon Web Services Public Summit, held earlier this week in Washington DC.
"We plan to start flying our first test passengers soon," he told the audience. "We expect to start selling tickets in 2019."
No price is given to try the reusable New Shepard launch system, but it will probably not cheap. The estimated price ranges from US$50,000 (Rp704 million) to US$250,000 (Rp3.5 billion) per seat.
Those who can afford it will feel the service. The New Shepard capsule accommodates six astronauts, and has an interior area of 530 square feet, a space that 10 times larger than NASA's Mercury capsule.
The reusable New Shepard rocket, driven by a single BE-3 engine, provides the 110,000-pound boost. Once the capsule crosses the line of Kármán, the boundary that separates the Earth's atmosphere from space (about 328,080 feet, or 60 miles above Earth), the passengers will be able to unfasten their seatbelts and lose weight. The mission ends with landing using the parachute and soft landings in the Texas desert.
In April, Bob Smith, chief executive of Blue Origin, said the company is in the process of ensuring that the aircraft is “good and stable and ready to fly".
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