After more than a year and a half, Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin is set to fly another space tourism mission as early as Sunday, the first since the company suffered an engine failure on a flight that ended with the capsule’s emergency escape system blasting it away from the rocket booster, which crashed in the West Texas desert.
Then, if all goes well, Virgin Galactic, the space venture founded by Richard Branson, is set to fly a mission of its own on June 8, sending another crew of four and two pilots to the edge of space and back and further expanding the ranks of space tourists who have glimpsed the Earth from outside the atmosphere.
The twin missions represent the progress the commercial space industry has made in reaching its goal of opening space to the masses. Combined, the companies have flown more than 60 people to space, including both Bezos and Branson and the first astronauts from Egypt, Portugal and Pakistan. But they also demonstrate the frustratingly fitful pace of progress to get to this point, how even stretches of triumph and breakthroughs have yielded to disappointment along a road that for the past 20 years has been lined with setbacks, disasters and delays. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
After the crash, and subsequent investigation involving the Federal Aviation Administration, Blue Origin hopes its return to human spaceflight will put it back on the path to opening space to the masses, marking another small step toward its goal of enabling “a million people living and working in space.” It flew a mission without any people on board in December.
On board the flight scheduled for Sunday will be Ed Dwight, 90, who was chosen by President John F. Kennedy to join an elite U.S. Air Force training program that fed into the NASA astronaut corps. While the Air Force recommended him for astronaut training, he was not selected and never flew to space.
But just as Blue hopes to get going again, Virgin Galactic will be standing down on commercial passenger service until sometime in 2026 after its flight next month while it develops a pair of next-generation spacecraft called Delta. Last year, the company was able to dramatically ramp up its flight cadence, flying its Unity spaceship on six human spaceflights in six months. It carried four passengers along with the two pilots on each space flight.
The company intends to retire its Unity spacecraft after the June flight and focus on developing its Delta spaceships, which it says will be able to carry six passengers and two pilots and fly far more frequently.
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In a recent earnings call, CEO Michael Colglazier said that with the new spaceships Virgin Galactic will be able to fly up to three times a week for a total of about 125 missions a year that will carry 750 people to space. “This is fantastic news,” he said.
Even better news for the company is that, if the projections come true, it would generate $3.6 million per flight with the new ticket price of $600,000. To achieve that, however, won’t be easy. The company still has to build the spacecraft, which are tethered to the belly of a mother ship, called Eve, a twin fuselage airplane that carries them to an altitude of some 40,000 feet. There the spacecraft are released and then fire their engine, while the pilots fly the spacecraft straight up to an altitude above 50 miles, where the FAA has said space begins.
Virgin Galactic also needs to make sure Eve is capable of that kind of flight cadence. And to generate that revenue, it also first has to fly the some 700 people who have already purchased tickets at lower prices and have been waiting to fly for years.
It also has to ensure it can fly safely. In 2014, one of the pilots was killed and another seriously injured during an accident of a test flight.
Wall Street has not treated the stock kindly. It now trades at about $1 a share. During the earnings call, the company reported a net loss of $102 million for the first quarter this year compared with a $159 million net loss for the same period last year.
Colglazier said that Virgin Galactic’s revenue “will grow substantially as we add new ships and expand across multiple spaceports” in different countries. It is also planning on adding to its fleet of spaceships.
Leading up to Blue Origin’s last human spaceflight mission, in August 2022, it was similarly optimistic. The flight marked the sixth time the company had ferried people to the edge of space and back, marking real progress since Bezos flew in the company’s New Shepard spacecraft in July 2021.
“All of these flights and a dedicated payload flight in just under a year, this is what building the road to space looks like — step by step ferociously,” Eddie Seyffert, the company’s webcast host, said then. “Twenty-five astronauts and counting.”
On the next flight, however, a mission to fly 36 payloads from schools, universities and organizations such as the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the rocket was lost because of the engine failure.
Since then, Blue Origin has gone through some significant changes. Late last year, CEO Bob Smith stepped down and was replaced by Dave Limp, a former top executive at Amazon. It won a coveted $3.4 billion contract from NASA to develop a lunar lander capable of flying astronauts to the moon. An executive said earlier this year that it would land a cargo variant of the vehicle on the moon next year.
It is also focused on finally flying its New Glenn rocket later this year. A much larger vehicle than New Shepard, New Glenn, which has seven first-stage engines, would be capable of lifting large amounts of mass to orbit and is seen as a key step for the company as it seeks to enter the launch market and compete with SpaceX and others.
Still, Bezos has said for years that flying New Shepard was an important step for the company to teach it how to fly safely and rapidly. And while space tourism has been dismissed as a frivolous pursuit for the wealthy, Bezos has defended it, saying that all sorts of technologies — including computing power — grew in prominence over time. “Tourism often leads to new technologies, and then those new technologies often circle back and get used in very important, utilitarian ways,” he said at a forum in 2016.
The key, he said, was to be able to fly at a high rate and get better each time.
“We humans don’t get great at things we do a dozen times a year,” he once said. “You never want a surgeon [who operates] just a dozen times a year. If you need to have surgery, find somebody who does the operation 20 to 25 times a week. That’s the right level of practice.”
