Commercial space flights likely two years away

Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic rivals for suborbital space passengers

On a West Texas plain in early October, engineers launched a liquid- fuel, single- engine rocket designed to carry passengers to the edge of space.

When it reached 16,000 feet, where it’s at peak aerodynamic stress, the rocket tested its emergency escape system. The bulbous capsule on top, where the crew would sit, fired a separate engine and lofted away, touching down safely nearby.

This launch, the sixth successful one in a year and a half for Blue Origin, the aerospace company funded by Amazon. com chief executive Jeff Bezos, highlighted efforts to make the craft disaster- proof.

A month earlier, an orbital rocket from Elon Musk’s SpaceX blew up on the launchpad, taking a US$ 200 million ($ 273m) Facebook satellite with it.

Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, long the front- runner in suborbital spaceflight tests, has had to rebuild after its SpaceShipTwo rocket- plane fatally crashed t wo years ago. Given its recent spaceflights, “Blue appears to be in the lead right now,” says Doug Messier, managing editor at space industry blog Parabolic Arc.

Blue Origin declined to comment for this story.

Virgin Galactic chief executive George Whitesides says most people who prepaid for flights on SpaceShipTwo stuck with his and Branson’s company. “They know that if it’s something that Richard’s going to fly on, something that I’m going to fly on, that I’m going to make damn sure that we feel comfortable putting people on,” Whitesides says. For any non- rocket- scientists, a