Space capsule for tourists on show
UNITED STATES: The seats are comfortable, laid back with headrests like in a dentist’s office. The walls are padded and white, and there are handles all over the place so that the floating astronauts can hang on like people riding the subway.
But it’s the windows that are the defining feature of the spacecraft that Jeffrey Bezos showed off yesterday at the Space Symposium, a conference in Colorado Springs.
In a year or more – Bezos said the timing hasn’t yet been decided – his space company Blue Origin plans to begin flying tourists past the edge of space, 100km high, where for about four minutes they’ll experience the thrill of weightlessness and view the curvature of the Earth.
‘‘Everybody says that when you go to space, it changes you,’’ said Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com and the owner of The Washington Post. ‘‘All the astronauts come back with stories like that. It’s very emotional to see this Earth, to see the thin layer of the atmosphere.’’
Blue Origin is one of several entrepreneurial companies seeking to lower the cost of access to space, and touch off what Bezos said could become a ‘‘golden age of space’’.
In addition to Blue Origin, Elon Musk’s Spacex has accomplished a series of feats, such as becoming the first commercial venture to fly a spacecraft to the International Space Station. Last week, Spacex became the first company to re-fly the first stage of a rocket that had delivered a payload to orbit.
Virgin Galactic, founded by Richard Branson, also plans to fly tourists to space, and is in the middle of testing its new space plane, Spaceshiptwo, which would be tethered to the bellow of a mothership and then launched in flight. Virgin charges US$250,000 a flight; Blue Origin hasn’t yet decided what its tickets would cost.
Flanked by the Blue Origin spacecraft and the New Shepard booster, which has flown past the edge of space five times, Bezos said the company could begin flying paying customers by as soon as 2018, but that the schedule is fluid.
While his ‘‘singular focus is people in space’’, the flight-testing programme will be deliberate and painstaking, he said.
‘‘We are not racing,’’ he said. ‘‘This vehicle is going to carry humans. We’re going to make it as safe as we can make it ... We’re not going to take any shortcuts.’’
The goal of Blue Origin, the space company Bezos founded in 2000, is to one day help enable ‘‘millions of people living and working in space,’’ as Bezos likes to say. Space tourism is a first step on that journey, Bezos said, a way for the company to practice launching on a frequent basis.
The suborbital tourist flights would require minimal training, he said, and be quick, just 10 or 11 minutes. As many as six passengers would board the spacecraft about 30 minutes before lift off.
Near the flight’s apogee, the capsule would separate from a booster that would fly back and land on a landing pad on the ground. The capsule would continue climbing, allowing the passengers to unbuckle, and then float around the cabin for about four minutes before the return flight down. – Washington Post