Seeing Their Competitors Succeed, Blue Origin Intends To Double Space Tourism Passengers This Year

Blue Origin wants to double the seats for space travel. (photo: doc. Blue Origin)

JAKARTA - After a few days Virgin Galactic opened its ticket sales, now Blue Origin intends to follow in his footsteps. Even the space company owned by Jeff Bezos intends to double the number of people who will be flown into space, in the first year of operation.

Of course this is easy for the company owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, because he can possibly carry two rockets at once on a trip.

So far, the space tourism company has flown 14 people into space on three flights in July, October and December. To meet the new flight fare, Blue Origin will need to bring in another New Shepard vehicle and reduce turnaround times between flights.

"The market is strong. It's very strong. The challenge for Blue right now is that we are actually in limited supply. No business wants to be limited in supply when there is strong demand," said Blue Origin Chief Executive Bob Smith.

"It is our duty to build new vehicles, get them ready and fly safely, and also improve the launch rhythm safely," he added.

Despite its intention to double its passengers, unfortunately, Blue Origin has not released the price per operational seat or how many people are waiting in line.

However, Chinese cryptocurrency entrepreneur Justin Sun managed to bid $28 million to join New Shepard's first crewed flight in July.

Cited from SpaceNews from Space, Wednesday, February 23, Blue Origin said that the auction gave space tourism companies an idea of what their customer base, which tends to be very rich.

The New Shepard spacecraft has a capacity of six people, and so far only one launch was last December with all the additional seats filled.

Smith declined to say how many New Shepard flights (manned or not) will fly by 2022, but noted that all manned flights will carry a maximum of six people.

As previously reported, Blue Origin's main competitor, Virgin Galactic, has just reopened ticket sales for 450.000 US dollars (IDR 6.4 billion) for each seat. Their mission was put on hold until later this year following maintenance and upgrade work on the VSS Unity spacecraft carrier, VMS Eve.

Virgin said it expects 1.000 people to fill its waiting list, up from 700 in November 2021, by which time commercial services are expected to begin in 2022. The company is also building a second spacecraft, which will each carry up to six tourists and two professional pilots.