Jeff Bezos wants Blue Origin to do for space tourism what Amazon did for e-commerce and he plans to start launching people into orbit as soon as 2018, according to a New York Times report.
Bezos is unreserved in his enthusiasm for space exploration, but actually running tours to space would mark a huge leap forward for the company. Admittedly it would only be short trips that offer a few minutes of weightlessness in the New Shepard spacecraft Blue Origin is working on. But a reusable craft sending up six people at a time dozens of times a year could bring in the kind of interest, and commensurate revenue and investment, that would take Blue Origin to a whole new level.
Bezos' light-hearted teasing of Elon Musk and SpaceX after the New Shepard launch in November may not have been technically accurate, but it does give a taste of the kind of competitiveness he is bringing to private space companies. And Blue Origin, SpaceX and Virgin Galactic have poached talent from each other over the years.
If the idea of space tourism sounds familiar, that's because you remember that Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic has been talking about sending people to space for fun for years. For now though, his company has sent only a few tourists into space, and there's no clear timeline on when it will regularly send up rockets with paying customers who just want to go to space for fun. Virgin arguably had trouble with too much hype, people got really excited about the idea of space tourism, but Branson's company just wasn't ready yet to actually carry out his goals yet.
That's an issue Bezos has said he is keen to avoid by managing expectations and making sure that space tourism isn't Blue Origin's only project. The company is also working on selling its rockets to other companies like United Launch Alliance and on developing a new heavy rocket. But the tourism idea isn't just because Bezos thinks it would be fun. The kind of technological development necessary to make the reusable ships work safely comes with a whole host of other developments that raise the level of the entire industry. And thousands of interested people are already petitioning to be one of the early space tourists, which in turn spurs new research.
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