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Could Amazon Founder Launch Space Tourists Next Year?

This article is more than 4 years old.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ rocket will likely delay launching tourists until at least 2020, according to reports.

This confirms rumors that Blue Origin was planning to delay on its 2019 launch date, which it was holding to as late as May. “By the end of the year, we are going to be flying humans on top of this rocket,” Ariane Cornell, director of astronaut and orbital Sales for Blue Origin, said in a livestream that month.

New Shepard’s spacecraft is designed to bring people into space for a few minutes at a time to let them glimpse the blackness of space and the curve of the blue Earth. But Blue Origin wants a few more test flights to ensure the rocket is safe enough for people.

“We hold ourselves to very, very high standards here,” CEO Bob Smith said in a recent CNBC interview. (Forbes has reached out to Blue Origin for comment.)

“We’re never going to fly until we’re absolutely ready,” Smith added in the interview. “I think we have a very, very good amount of confidence around the system itself. I think it is working very, very well. But we have to go look at all the analysis, and then convince ourselves that we’re ready to go. ... So it probably will be next year.”

Tickets for these first flights are expected to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per person at the beginning, then come down to something more affordable in the coming years.

Bezos has said he sees Blue Origin as his legacy company, once calling it “the most important work I’m doing” because it aims to make the experience of space more affordable for tourists in the long run. He said he is glad to spend his money there to improve the experience of humanity, who would get to see Earth from space and potentially move further out in the solar system. (On a related note, Blue Origin has made a robotic lander for future moon missions called “Blue Moon”, which could support NASA lunar operations.)

Regardless of their flight status, Blue Origin is taking a hold on geek popular culture. The company was the subject of a gag in a recent episode of tech company comedy Silicon Valley this month, when a character angry at Amazon made a remark about where Bezos could put one of his “rocketships”.

Bezos’ Blue Origin isn’t the only space tourist company facing delays. Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic had hoped to fly tourists as early as 2007, but a series of production delays and a fatal accident in 2014 pushed operational flights back to at least 2020. That said, the company has made multiple test flights beyond the Federal Aviation Administration’s definition of space at 50 miles. This is still, however, below the 62-mile “Karman line” boundary accepted by space authorities around the world.

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