Blue Origin will begin manned flights next year

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has confirmed that his Blue Origin space-tourism venture will launch a crewed mission sometime in 2019.

The revelation was made today at the Air Force Association’s Air, Space and Cyber Conference in Washington, DC.

The comments from the 54-year-old multi-billionaire further fuel the commercial space race as several private companies jostle to become the first to send paying customers into space.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is worth an estimated $159 billion – making him the wealthiest man on the planet – and is using part of this vast fortune to bankroll Blue Origin.

SpaceX founder and commercial space-flight trailblazer Elon Musk announced earlier this week that Japanese billionaire and fashion designer Yusaku Maezawa is the first customer to sign-up for a trip around the moon. 

Bezos refused to say whether the first suborbital trip on Blue Origin’s New Shepard capsule would exclusively host crew members, rather than paying customers.

His comments reinforce a timeline the space tourism firm has been publicly teasing for some time.

Blue Origin’s CEO, Bob Smith, said last year the company was hoping to launch paying passengers in 2018.

However, this ambitious goal has been revised to 2020 following a number of test flights.

The first tickets are expected to go on sale at some point next year. 

The space tourism company, headquartered in Kent, Washington, is looking to sell tickets aboard its rocket for around £150,000 to £230,000 ($200,000 to $300,000), according to sources with knowledge of the plans.

By comparison, Virgin Galactic started selling tickets more than a decade ago, even while SpaceShipTwo was still in the early stages of development.

The company has approximately 700 customers who have paid at least a deposit.

Blue Origin is looking to double its current workforce to around 3,000 employees over the next two to three years, according to sources speaking to Reuters.

The urgency centers on a rocket dubbed New Glenn.

The heavy-launch vehicle, which Bezos promises will be able to haul satellites and, eventually, people into orbit, is central to the company’s hopes of winning lucrative military and commercial contracts.

New Glenn’s first-stage booster will be reusable – a key piece of Bezos’ strategy to lower costs and increase the frequency of launches. Blue Origin executives have stated publicly that test flights will begin within two years.

But whether Blue Origin can hit that mark remains to be seen. With the clock ticking on 2020, company engineers are still finalizing details on New Glenn’s design and just beginning to build model components that must be put through extreme testing, people familiar with the project said. 

Blue Origin has been a quieter party in the space race, with Bezos often outshone by billionaire rivals Elon Musk and Richard Branson who head up SpaceX and Virgin Galactic, respectively. 

The battle of the billionaires between Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Richard Branson continues to rage on, with all three firms achieving milestones in recent months.

Blue Origin completed its ninth successful test flight in July, SpaceX built on the success of the Falcon 9 launch by declaring the first passenger to go around the moon and Virgin Galactic sent the Unity spacecraft to an altitude of 46,500ft before it went supersonic – the first successful test flight since a catastrophic test in 2014 that killed one pilot and seriously injured another.  

Blue Origin’s test site in West Texas saw the most recent launch in July, when ‘Version 2.0’ of its crew capsule, outfitted with the large windows that are a distinctive feature of the spacecraft, took off.

The capsule carried 12 experiments as well as a test dummy, dubbed ‘Mannequin Skywalker,’ to measure the environment a human would experience on those flights.

The test flight was the first performed under a launch license awarded by the Federal Aviation Administration in August 2017.

‘You have to be licensed in order to collect revenue,’ Jeff Ashby, a former Nasa astronaut who is director of safety and mission assurance for Blue Origin, told the Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference.

‘It was our first revenue flight for payloads: a huge, historic moment for us.’

‘We’re probably a year and a half, two years out from when we’re actually able to fly tended payloads,’ Ashby said, which will see astronauts working with experiments on missions.

‘We’re about roughly a year out from human flights, depending on how the test program goes. 

‘We have a bunch more tests to do, and we’re going to fly some human test flights before we put paying people in the rocket.’

Blue Origin has yet to start selling seats on New Shepard flights. 

‘We have not yet opened our website for tickets yet, and we won’t do that until we’re flying the versions of the rocket and capsule that people will ride on, to be delivered some time next year,’ he said. ‘But we think there’s a lot of interest.’

Blue Origin has released footage from inside its reusable space capsule, flown successfully for the first time this week to reveal the plush interior.

GOING TO SPACE WITH BLUE ORIGIN: HOW IT WORKS

The system consists of a pressurised crew capsule atop a reusable ‘New Shepard’ booster rocket.

The two vehicles launch together, accelerating for approximately two and a half minutes, before the engine cuts off.

The capsule then separates from the booster to coast quietly into space.

After a few minutes of free fall, the booster performs an autonomous rocket-powered vertical landing.

The passenger capsule lands softly under parachutes, both ready to be used again.

Like previous Blue origin launches, the New Shepard rocket fired into orbit (one) before disconnecting from the passenger capsule (two), and then landing vertically (four and five) back on the launch pad. Shortly after this, the ‘Crew Capsule 2.0’ pod floated back to the ground (six)

The ‘Crew Capsule 2.0’ reached orbit and returned to Earth with a test dummy strapped into it called Mannequin Skywalker, who can be seen taking a dizzying ride into space before returning back to Earth.

While the flight itself provided stunning views of the Earth below, the landing is not for the faint hearted, with the capsule containing the test dummy seen spinning before kicking up a cloud of dust upon impact.

Mannequin Skywalker was launched aboard New Shepard, a prototype rocket being developed by Blue Origin, during the test flight on Tuesday.

Bezos took to Twitter at the time to share a video that captured every moment of the 11 minute long flight.

Viewers can watch out of the window as the vessel blasts off the launch pad before rapidly ascending, with the ground below quickly giving way to the blue hues of the upper atmosphere. 

The craft then begins to descend, with mountains and plains below rising into view, before the craft makes a firm landing.

During the flight, Blue Origin reached a maximum altitude of 322,032 feet (62miles / 99km).

Bezos has assured future customers that they will have a better experience than Mannequin Skywalker.

Writing on Twitter, he said: ‘Unlike him, you’ll be able to get out of your seat during the zero gee part of the flight.

‘And ignore the pinging sound – it’s just from one of the experiments on this flight.’

The capsule’s roomy interior includes seats for six travellers, who will be treated to views from the ‘largest windows in space’ when the firm begins commercial flights.

Launching from Blue Origin’s West Texas Launch Site, Tuesday’s test featured the latest version of the firm’s reusable New Shepard rocket, its first flight in 14 months.

The ‘Crew Capsule 2.0’ reached orbit and returned to Earth with a test dummy strapped into it called ‘Mannequin Skywalker’ (pictured), who ‘had a great ride’, according to Bezos

WHO IS JEFF BEZOS?

Jeff Bezos is best known as the founder and CEO of online giant Amazon. 

Born in New Mexico and raised in Houston, Texas, he went on to attend the prestigious Princeton University and graduated in 1986. 

After a decade or so of work on Wall Street, Mr Bezos founded his own company in 1994.

Jeff Bezos was born in 1964 and is founder and CEO of Amazon. He is also the richest person in the world 

He initially called his company Cadabra, and then reportedly changed the name to Amazon when a colleague misheard it as ‘cadaver’.

Initially, it was launched as an online book store working out of Bezo’s garage in Seattle but rapidly grew to include a variety of goods and services. 

Now, Amazon is one of the biggest companies in the world and the most successful website in the world.

In 2018, the company is worth around $900 (£691 billion).

Mr Bezos himself has an estimated net worth of $150 billion (£115 billion).

He has bought and accumulated a variety of different companies and outlets including: Whole Foods, The Washington Post, Twitch and IMDB. 

He has a controlling share of 17 per cent in his first company, Amazon. 

In 2017, Jeff Bezos surpassed Bill Gates to become the richest person in the world, and the richest person of the modern world. 

He has been married since 1994 and has four children.  

In October, Bezos said Blue Origin will take tourists into orbit ‘within the next 18 months’.

The company isn’t yet taking reservations or publishing its ticket prices, with would-be riders forced to wait until the firm completes its tests.

In a separate video of the launch, the New Shepard rocket is captured firing into orbit, disconnecting from the capsule, and then landing vertically back on the launch pad.

Shortly after this, the ‘Crew Capsule 2.0’ pod is seen floating back to the ground under two enormous parachutes before landing in the Texas desert at around 1 mile per hour (1.6 kph), according to Blue Origin.

At the end of the video, the firm teased in big letters: ‘Ready to fly?’

In addition to the dummy, yesterday’s 10-minute test flight carried 12 commercial, research and educational payloads within the crew capsule, Blue Origin said.

The capsule offers 530 cubic feet (15 cubic metres) of space – large enough for passengers to float freely and turn weightless somersaults.

The include reclining black seats with blue piping, and seats emblazoned with the Blue Origin feather logo.

‘Today’s flight of New Shepard was a tremendous success,’ Blue Origin CEO Bob Smith said at the time.

‘It marks the inaugural flight of our next-generation crew capsule as we continue step-by-step progress in our test flight program.’

THE BILLIONAIRE SPACE RACE: THE DETAILS

Jeff Bezos in front of Blue Origin’s space capsule

Jeff Bezos’ space tourism project with Blue Origin is competing with a similar programme in development by Space X, the rocket firm founded and run by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, and Virgin Galactic, backed by Richard Branson.

Bezos revealed in April 2017 that he finances Blue Origin with around $1 billion (£720 million) of Amazon stock each year.

The system consists of a pressurised crew capsule atop a reusable ‘New Shepard’ booster rocket. 

The richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos is pursuing Blue Origin with vigour as he tries to launch his ‘New Glenn’ rocket into low-Earth orbit by 2020.  

Whilst Bezos is yet to leave the atmosphere of Earth, despite several successful launches, Elon Musk’s SpaceX programme has already sent the Falcon Heavy rocket into space.

On February 6 2018, SpaceX sent the rocket towards the orbit of Mars, 140 million miles away. 

On board was a red Tesla roadster that belonged to Musk himself.

Elon Musk with his Dragon Crew capsule

SpaceX have won several multi-million dollar contracts from Nasa as the space agency hopes to use the rockets as a fast-track for its colonisation of the red planet. 

Richard Branson and Virgin Galactic recently successfully conducted a test flight of the Virgin Galactic’s Unity spaceplane.   

The flight accelerated to over 1,400 miles per hour (Mach 1.87).

Calling space ‘tantalisingly close’, Branson also said last year that suborbital space in test flights could be happening by this spring. 

More than 700 affluent customers to date, including celebrities Brad Pitt and Katy Perry, have reserved a $250,000 (£200,000) seat on one of Virgin’s space trips, 

The billionaire mogul also said he expects Elon Musk to win the race to Mars with his private rocket firm SpaceX. 

Richard Branson with the Virgin Galactic craft

SpaceShipTwo will carry six passengers and two pilots. Each passenger gets the same seating position with two large windows – one to the side and one overhead.

The space ship is 60ft long with a 90inch diameter cabin allowing maximum room for the astronauts to float in zero gravity.

A climb to 50,000ft before the rocket engine ignites. Passengers become ‘astronauts’ when they reach the Karman line, the boundary of Earth’s atmosphere, at which point SpaceShipTwo separates from its carrier aircraft, White Knight II.

The spaceship will then make a sub-orbital journey with approximately six minutes of weightlessness, with the entire flight lasting approximately 3.5 hours.  

On Twitter, Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos wrote: ‘#NewShepard had a successful first flight of Crew Capsule 2.0 today. Complete with windows and our instrumented test dummy. He had a great ride.’

Blue Origin’s suborbital New Shepard launch system consists of a rocket and capsule designed to fly payloads and passengers to about 100 kilometres (62 miles) above the planet.

Test flights with crew members aboard are expected to begin next year. 

Every seat on the flight will have access to a large window, which the company says is made of multiple layers of fracture-tough materials.

Minimising distortion and reflection, the windows transmit 92 per cent of visible light giving them visibility ‘as good as glass’, according to Blue Origin.

The system consists of a pressurised capsule on top of a reusable booster rocket.

The two vehicles launch together, accelerating for approximately two and a half minutes, before the engine cuts off.

The capsule then separates from the booster to coast quietly into space.

After a few minutes of free fall, the booster performs an autonomous rocket-powered vertical landing, while the capsule lands softly under parachutes, both ready to be used again.

ELON MUSK’S HISTORIC SPACEX MOON MISSION

SpaceX is to launch a private mission on a journey to circumnavigate the moon and return to Earth.

Lift-off will be from Kennedy Space Center’s historic Pad 39A near Cape Canaveral – the same launch pad used by the Apollo program for its lunar missions. 

The mission will use one of SpaceX’s Dragon capsules, which will be modified to allow communications in deep space. 

The Dragon will be capable of operating autonomously throughout the whole flight, but the passengers will be trained in emergency procedures. 

The mission would ‘do a long loop around the moon’ and would take about a week.

Musk says it will ‘skim the surface of the moon, go quite a bit further out into deep space’ and then return to Earth. 

The total flight would go about 300,000 to 400,000 miles into space.

The mission will use one of SpaceX’s Dragon capsules, which will be modified to allow communications in deep space.

The mission will use one of SpaceX’s Dragon capsules, which will be modified to allow communications in deep space.

Musk said it would be roughly the cost of a crewed mission to the International Space Station, and that other flight crews have already expressed interest in later flights.

‘This presents an opportunity for humans to return to deep space for the first time in 45 years and they will travel faster and further into the Solar System than any before them,’ SpaceX said.

The mission would ‘do a long loop around the moon’ and would take about a week.

‘It would skim the surface of the moon, go quite a bit further out into deep space’ and then return to Earth, Musk said.

‘There is some risk here,’ he said, adding the hopeful passengers are not ‘naive’ about the dangers.