Blue Origin vs Virgin Galactic - The race for space tourism.
- Octet Ridges
- Nov 3, 2019
- 2 min read
Space Tourism was a dream for older generations. But companies like Blue Origin are trying to help everyday people experience space for a couple of minutes with their suborbital rocket , the New Shepard. The New Shepard is a human-rated suborbital rocket , powered by Blue Origin's BE-3 engine and is a single stage to orbit [SSTO] class rocket. This rocket will just kiss the boundary of space at an altitude of around 100 km, also known as the Karman Line. After the booster separates with the crew capsule , the booster comes down and does a landing burn before touchdown on the landing pad at its Texas launch site. This rocket accelerates to more than Mach 3 or three times the speed of sound. The crew capsule , which can carry up to six tourists , will get a gravity-free flight for a few minutes at the edge of space before touchdown near the launch facility. Now , the next vehicle designed for space tourism is Virgin Galactic's VSS Unity. It is a suborbital rocket powered spaceplane which can reach an altitude of about 80 km. The VSS Unity will take-off from a runway attached to a twin fuselage airplane which will release the VSS Unity at a given altitude from where it will ignite its engine for a 40 second burn time to get it to about 79 km in altitude and around Mach 2.73. After its suborbital flight , the VSS Unity will glide back to Earth like the Space Shuttle did and land on a runway strip. The Blue Origin is very tight lipped about its rockets and pricing but we can expect it to put up a price tag of about $200,000 per ticket. The ticket for a flight on the VSS Unity could cost you around $250,000 per ticket but the 2014 Spaceship 2 crash which killed one pilot and injuring the other grounded their tourism dream and went back to the development of a human-rated launch vehicle. But , the question arises. Can everyday people afford this tour or only the ultra-rich can enjoy the beauty of space. But one day , we will be able to tell , pointing at the sky "Look! I've been there".
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