Space tourism: Bezosen Blue Origin has established its first flight for July Space News

Jeff Bezos ’film Blue Origin will begin transporting paid suborbital space to passengers this summer on the New Shepard rocket and will auction off the last remaining seat on the initial flight.

“We’re ready, it’s game time,” Ariane Cornell, sales director for Blue Origin astronauts, told Al Jazeera.

On May 5, 1961, Alan Shepard became the first American in space. Sixty years later, Blue Origin announced that the rocket bearing its name was ready to make its first crew flight.

For now, the exact details of prices and future flights have not yet been determined, but the company opened a public auction on the last seat of the last flight, earning profits for the benefit of Club for the Future, a non-profit organization. careers in science, math, engineering and technology.

The sealed online offerings will run for two weeks from Wednesday, and will allow tourists who wish to offer any amount of space. These bids will go public on May 19, and the competition will end on June 12 with a live auction.

The winner will have just over a month to prepare for their first trip to suborbital space.

Exploring suborbital space

Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket and crew capsule are designed to transport six people and scientific equipment, beyond an invisible line, known as the Karman Line, that separates Earth from space.

The rocket and crew capsule are completely reusable and have undergone 15 test flights in the last 15 years to prepare for the ultimate goal of transporting people. The capsules from previous flights have reached a height of 100km (about 62 miles).

The large capsule windows offer passengers wonderful views as they spend approximately 10 minutes at zero gravity before they can float inside the cabin before returning to Earth.

To cross the Karman line, passengers are thrown inside the crew capsule on the rocket. The rocket immediately disintegrates and lands. Once the target is reached, the capsule will be dropped by a parachute before it touches the Texas desert.

On the company’s last flight in April, company executives dressed as astronauts conducted tests and procedures to prepare people for launch. They then dismantled the vehicle before launching it.

Blue Origin told Al Jazeera that the exercise was “a step in verifying the operations of the vehicle and the astronauts before it flew.” Now, the company says it has done astronaut checks and is ready to fly people in July.

Fly first

So who will fly in the Blue Origin rocket? Five of the six seats on the first flight will be filled by astronauts who plan to be named later. Sixth place will go to the winner of the auction – if they meet the requirements.

In fine print, the winning astronaut must weigh between 49 kg (110 pounds) and 101 kg (223 pounds) and be 5 feet (1.5 meters) and 6 feet 4 inches (2 meters) tall.

Passengers also have to endure 3g of strength for a couple of minutes on the climb (or up to three times the weight), and five and a half times the weight (or 5.5g) for a few seconds. lowering into the atmosphere, the company said.

Cornell said the specific details of the other passengers will come later and that the company plans several more flights for the crew before the end of the year.

When people start taking it, Blue Origin will compete in the space tourism dollar with Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic.

Blue Origin’s New Shepard booster appears after a successful test flight [Credit: Blue Origin]

The British company has already started selling seats in its vehicle, called SpaceShipTwo. These seats will be priced at $ 250,000 for people who register early. Recently, the company announced that it would charge more than that for subsequent registrations, but has yet to announce its new price.

Veteran NASA astronaut Thomas Jones said these flights will be like reliving Alan Shepard’s first flight.

“On this route, passengers will have a weight loss of about five to 10 minutes,” Jones told Al Jazeera, “and the route from engine start to landing will be about 30 minutes.”

Blue Origin isn’t the only space company to auction off a seat in the crew capsule.

Billionaire Jared Issacman four seats reserved In the SpaceX Dragon crew capsule as part of a mission called Inspiration4.

Issacman to raise money for St Jude Children’s Research Hospital, an organization that cares for children with cancer a seat at auction and chose the winner of the second seat through a fundraising campaign conducted through his company.

The last seat on Isaacman’s flight came to Hayley Arceneaux, a cancer survivor and assistant physician working in St Jude.

This flight, which will launch this fall, will be a private space mission to space.