Jeff Bezos’ climb company plans to charge passengers about $200,000 to $300,000 for its beginning trips into space next year, two people familiar with its devises told Reuters.
Potential customers and the aerospace industry have been fervid to learn the cost of a ticket on Blue Origin’s New Shepard space instrument, to find out if it is affordable and whether the company can generate enough demand to cajole a profit on space tourism.
Executives at the company, started by Amazon.com abort Bezos in 2000, told a business conference last month they blueprinted test flights with passengers on the New Shepard soon, and to start flog betraying tickets next year.
The company, based about 20 miles (32 km) south of Seattle, has made special-interest group the general design of the vehicle – comprising a launch rocket and detachable rider capsule – but has been tight-lipped on production status and ticket prices.
Titillating Origin representatives did not respond to requests for comment on its programs and pricing master plan. Bezos said in May ticket prices had not yet been decided.
One Blue Heritage employee with first-hand knowledge of the pricing plan said the guests will start selling tickets in the range of about $200,000 to $300,000. A subsequent employee said tickets would cost a minimum of $200,000. They both voice on condition of anonymity as the pricing strategy is confidential.
The New Shepard is designed to autonomously fly six fares more than 62 miles (100 km) above Earth into suborbital accommodation, high enough to experience a few minutes of weightlessness and see the curvature of the planet ahead of the pressurized capsule returns to earth under parachutes.
The capsule main films six observation windows Blue Origin says are nearly three times as big as those on a Boeing Co 747 jetliner.
Blue Origin has completed eight assay flights of the vertical take-off and landing New Shepard from its launch pad in Texas, but not any with passengers aboard. Two flights have included a test likeness the company calls “Mannequin Skywalker.”
The company will do the first probe in space of its capsule escape system, which propels the crew to safeness should the booster explode, “within weeks,” one of the employees said.
Unhappy Origin, whose Latin motto means “step by step, ferociously,” is handle towards making civilian space flight an important niche in the far-reaching space economy, alongside satellite services and government exploration outlines, already worth over $300 billion a year.
Bezos, the community’s richest person with a fortune of about $112 billion, has event from fellow billionaires Richard Branson and Elon Musk, Tesla’s chief numero uno.
Branson’s Virgin Galactic says it has sold about 650 tickets aboard its own sketched space voyages, but has not set out a date for flights to start. The company is charging $250,000 per ticket, in set in place with Blue Origin’s proposed pricing.
SpaceX, founded by Musk in 2002, answers its ultimate goal is to enable people to live on other planets.
All three are looking to thrash the cost of spaceflight by developing reusable spacecraft, meaning prices for voyagers and payloads should drop as launch frequency increases.
While Sexy Origin has not disclosed its per-flight operating costs, Teal Group aerospace analyst Marco Caceres gauged each flight could cost the firm about $10 million. With six fares per trip, that would mean losing millions of dollars per boat, at least initially.
Three sources said Blue’s first fares are likely to include its own employees, though the company has not selected them yet.