#Jeff bezos rocket price how to

The first, most important event was in 2015, when SpaceX being able to launch a Falcon 9 to orbit and retrieve the first stage booster, saving tens of millions of dollars per flight. Credit: Jonathan Newton / The Washington Post via Getty Images Liftoff of a SpaceX Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon carrying four astronauts to the International Space Station on April 23, 2021. Many such examples are easily found.īut reasonable arguments about access to spaceflight can be made on both sides of this issue, as long as you assume progress will continue more or less as it has in the past few years. The Virgin Galactic flight was delayed years due to a fatal accident. SpaceX was within a single launch of bankruptcy. Still, predicting the future of spaceflight is a notoriously tricky game. Orbital flight is far more difficult and expensive, with a lot more overhead (you’re in space for days, not minutes) passengers pay SpaceX $55 million per head for that privilege (which includes a stay in the International Space Station just a ride in a Dragon capsule to orbit and back would undoubtedly be far less).īut that’s for now. Blue Origin hasn’t announced what it will cost to ride with them, but it will certainly be at least that much. Credit: Blue Origin / Anadolu Agency via Getty ImagesĬurrently, it’ll set you back $250,000 or so to fly Virgin Galactic. Touchdown of the crew capsule from the first crewed flight of Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket, which carried four passengers into space. So is space travel an elite rich person’s game? Or will the price come down to within reach of more median incomes? There have been several space tourists since, and they’ve all been extremely wealthy (or have been backed by people who are).

Note that Tito is a billionaire too (he was “only” a multi-millionaire at the time, to be clear). Even being a tourist is pricey the first paid space tourist was Dennis Tito, who reportedly paid $20 million to ride into orbit on a Russian Soyuz rocket in 2001. Elon Musk has not yet flown on a SpaceX rocket, but he too is a billionaire and plans to get to space someday.Ĭlearly, flying to space on your own spacecraft is an expensive endeavor. Both men are billionaires, and both flew on craft built by their own companies. Much has been made of this flight, along with Richard Branson’s flight last week on board Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity. That is higher than the generally accepted altitude of 80 km (50 miles) marking the edge of space, making the four passengers officially astronauts. It was a suborbital flight, which means they essentially went straight up and then back down, reaching a height of over 107 km above Earth’s surface. The prospect of finally booking a ticket to space is in fact very exciting for outer space aficionados-but the New Shepard space tour is just the beginning when it comes to real space travel.Yesterday, Jeff Bezos - the founder and CEO of Amazon, and, not incidentally, Blue Origin - took a ride into space along with three other people inside the capsule of a New Shepard rocket. The price of a ticket to Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic offering, to give you an idea, is about US$250,000 per passenger. While Blue Origin has remained tight lipped about the cost of the tickets, Bezos has mentioned in passing that the cost of a ride on the New Shepard tourism rocket will be comparable with other space tourism companies.

“Guys, how exciting is this-come on!” Bezos said in the video, which was aptly titled “It's time.”

#Jeff bezos rocket price how to

The clock is set to countdown to May 5-when the company is expected to reveal more details on the space tourism venture, including how to secure tickets. The company had announced the exciting news via a video released on Thursday-which officially marked a countdown clock on the Blue Origin website. Jeff Bezos’ space venture Blue Origin has this week announced its plans to begin selling tickets for a ride on its “New Shepard” space tourism rocket.