Blue Origin plans to charge at least $200K for space rides | Hacker News Reader

Blue Origin plans to charge at least $200K for space rides

reuters.com

56 pointsmyroon550 comments

I'd be happy to take out a mortgage if this ride includes going around the Earth at least once. If it's just a go up, be up very briefly then I'd be less enthusiastic.

In other words, I am not Besos-rich but hell yes, I am going to space!

Yeah, I share the same sentiment. 200k+ for a few minutes in zero-g just isn't enough for me, but if it we're a few hours in zero-g as we go around the globe once? That'd be awesome and I'd easily justify that price.

Yeah if I want to feel freefall for a short time, I can just go for a tandem jump for 0.1% of this price. I even heard of indoor skydiving being fun and supposedly they are opening one here in Vancouver, BC next year.

>I can just go for a tandem jump for 0.1% of this price

But neither of those is 0g. Skydiving is sort of 0g at the beginning when you’re accelerating, but that tapers off to 1g as you approach terminal velocity. Same goes for indoor skydiving.

Parabolic flight is about $5k and gets you a few minutes of zero-g in several 30-second chunks.

Ooooooo this sounds amazing, thanks for the tip.

Once around in LEO takes about 90 minutes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWp4suB60fg

skip to 1:18. That's about 55 miles high view, similar to Blue Origin. It's nice, but perhaps not $200k for most people.

This is sped up view from ISS, which is 250 miles up. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FG0fTKAqZ5g

Yeah I think a lot of people will gladly pay $200k for the second view... actually probably much more.

I wonder what the flat-earthers think of the first video. They probably just call it fake news.

Regarding the second video, does anyone know why the limit of the atmosphere is visible?

The delta-v and velocity for a suborbital flight with 5 minutes of weightlessness is very different than orbital... For those who are curious, try simulating it in Kerbal Space Program.

On the real earth (not KSP) including atmospheric drag you need around 8000m/s delta-V to achieve low earth orbit.

Musk/Shotwell have said you will be able to take inter-city rocket trips for the same price as an economy plane ticket by 2028.

It's 2018 and people still credulously report whatever pr optimised nonsense tech-time tuple Musk has said. _Of course_ you will not be flying New York-London on a rocket for $500 in 2028.

I agree.

I recently doubted commercial viability of point-to-point Earth flights on BFR (on /r/spacex) and got lots of comments that since Musk promised it then of course it would be viable and as cheap as business class ticket now, maybe twice more. The calculation that followed was, quote "200000$ for fuel price divided by number of passengers and then add 5000$ per ticket for operational expenses, total 8000$ per ticket". I wonder what sane person could believe that, even with the stellar record of SpaceX RnD.

Musk said for the price of an economy ticket.

A point-to-point flight on the BFR will include a suborbital trajectory that should last half an hour, and take you halfway around the globe. It's target price is ~10,000 USD, but I'm sure (if it happens) then the first few years of flights will be substantially more expensive.

I'm as skeptical as anyone that SpaceX could pull it off, but the numbers work out. With half-hour flights, BFR could do 10 routes per day whereas a Boeing 747 could only do one. So even if the ship costs five times as much to build as the Boeing, it will amortize in half the time. With such short flights vehicle flight staffing could be a quarter what current airlines staff, and there is no need of meal service. Note also that Gwynne Shotwell said that she has a personal interest in seeing the BFR fly and she firmly believes that it will. She's not Elon: Gwynne actually has both feet on the ground and runs the _business_ side of SpaceX.

The only real hurdles that I see are the high-G launches and reentry, and of course reliability. Current launch vehicles have a ~1:50 launch failure rate. I'll fly on that, but I won't put my kids on it.

Isn't a rocket much, much louder than an airplane? I'd think noise regulation is a major hurdle.

The launch pads will need to be about 20km from inhavited areas, and 5km apart from each other.

So, only 80 square KM needs to be dedicated to each launch pad?

5² * π ≈ 80

Anyone taking this ride for the prestige of being an astronaut, rather than intrinsic reasons, is likely to find that, for most people, suborbital flight doesn't count. Tom Wolfe's "The Right Stuff" describes John Glenn's understanding of this perception (though in general, that book is more journalism than history (and the movie is a movie.))

I want to see the Blue Marble. I am an 43 out of shape sw engineer and I am very realistic about me being an astronaut is as likely as me winning the next Boston Marathon (at this point finishing it would be very surprising).

I don't see how having a loss leader for viewing space is going to work out for them financially. What are you going to upsell?

Although I do recognize this doesn't really appear to be a purely commercial venture, yet.

Maybe it's a way to fundraise. Take rich people into space, they're wowed, impressed, etc, and then more likely to invest in them?

True - I guess that would work from a loss leading perspective. Although it's not making money in the classic sense, that could lead to lucritive contracts.

Maybe it can lead to lucritive contracts. It could be advertising: you take clients who are wealthy enough to pay $200k for the experience, those clients might be business owners/influencial folks, who are then moved to integrate it in some what into what they do? Seems plausable at least.

Then again, Bezos could float the company for quite a long time if he personally invests, so maybe it's just a way to build credit and then do other things (e.g. gov. contracts). Amazon was unprofitable for quite a long time before it took over the world, afterall..

It's spelled lucrative.

From Latin http://latin-dictionary.net/definition/25941/lucrativus-lucr...

Sending your own employees up first will work out even worse financially. I assume it's a combination of safety testing, eating-your-own-dogfood (in a potentially fatal sense), working out minor kinks for an overall positive experience, and maybe that cost includes a lot of the startup/fixed costs and the final amortized cost will be closer to under $200k. Sort of like Tesla cars.

I don't see how having a loss leader for viewing space is going to work out for them financially.

Does the article say it will be a loss leader? If so, then I missed that. I've seen $200,000 quoted for the fuel of an orbital rocket.

Costs per passenger for a reusable vehicle like this are largely a function of launch rate. Launch a few per year, it'll lose millions. Launch a hundred, and they'll make plenty of money.

Additionally, you should highly doubt this kind of outside estimate of cost per New Shepard launch. It sounds like they used the same costs as you would expect for a fully expendable rocket like Falcon 1e class (same first stage thrust, for instance), even though New Shepard is fully reusable.

And lastly, these suborbital New Shepard launches are also a big advertisement for orbital New Glenn launches which are orders of magnitude longer in duration. New Glenn could also take people around the Moon or, with the (eventually) reusable "Blue Moon" lander that Blue Origin is also developing, to the Moon's surface and back. So there's actually a lot of upsell, and I believe they've been explicit about using New Shepard to upsell for eventual orbital flights.

>Additionally, you should highly doubt this kind of outside estimate of cost per New Shepard launch. It sounds like they used the same costs as you would expect for a fully expendable rocket like Falcon 1e class (same first stage thrust, for instance), even though New Shepard is fully reusable.

The article discusses intended price, not cost. And $1.2 million/flight is significantly less than Falcon 1.

>So there's actually a lot of upsell, and I believe they've been explicit about using New Shepard to upsell for eventual orbital flights.

Definitely. It's also important to note that New Shepard and New Glenn have significant technology overlap - NS development costs won't have to be amortized by passenger flights alone.

From the article:

> While Blue Origin has not disclosed its per-flight operating costs, Teal Group aerospace analyst Marco Caceres estimated each flight could cost the firm about $10 million. With six passengers per trip, that would mean losing millions of dollars per launch, at least initially.

> I don't see how having a loss leader for viewing space is going to work out for them financially. What are you going to upsell?

I see a lot of the same mistake being made in this thread. Confusing short-term vs long-term.

The tourist business is a meaningless part of the long-term strategy that Bezos is pursuing. Short-term it might bring in some revenue as they pursue building ever more powerful rockets. You're better off entirely disregarding anything Blue Origin does as it relates to tourism, it's a momentary toy for stage one; it's not where they're going. As a side, it also has the simultaneous benefit of enabling Blue Origin to get paid to work on dealing with civilians in space, as they seek to push further in the general direction of building infrastructure in space over decades. To go that direction, they'll have to build-out systems that are extremely well designed for non-astronauts. If your vision is to have very large numbers of people in space, your requirement can't be that they're all as well trained for space as astronauts are today.

Bezos currently has $143 billion of paper worth to utilize. It's not going to be spent on a $50 million per year space tourism business.

Jeff bezos is worth 143 Billion dollars [0] and he sells a billion dollars a year to fund his toy space company blue origin [1]. With your standard 4% takeout from investments, he could increase their funding by 6% forever and not lose any money. With the way Amazon stock is growing, that could be an order of magnitude higher.

Financials mean nothing to this company.

[0]: https://www.google.com/search?q=jeff+bezos+worth&oq=jeff+bez...

[1]: http://fortune.com/2017/04/05/jeff-bezos-amazon-stock-sale-b...

Honestly,I would be more willing to pay for a ride into the Mariana trench or other extremely deep ocean expeditions. I get it's about the experience but imagine seeing creatures few people (if anyone) has ever seen. I read something the other day on the lines of "10+ people have been to the moon but only 3 have been to the Mariana trench".

I always dreamed of going to places here on earth hardly anyone has been to,space is great but I feel like it wouldn't be very exciting unless I get to explore and interact with the environment,maybe a lunar expedition will be available before I get too old.

(Drop me a reply if you know of any jobs in remote places nobody wants to go to)

I'd rather go to space than the mariana trench just because of all the unknowns going into the deep sea would make me paranoid

Valid point. Going into space, by comparison, is time-tested and a solved problem. You will know exactly what to expect from the start.

Not quite Marianas Trench levels of remote, but the first place that springs to mind is Antarctica; I'm not familiar with the organization of the various research stations, but there is presumably some number of support staff needed on-site to keep everything running.

The US contractor is Raytheon and they have job postings on their company website. Here is the wiki for their operations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raytheon_Polar_Services_Compan...

I have looked into getting a job in Antarctica. There are indeed some support people required. If you can drive big vehicles for example, that's something they need. The Ice Cube project even needs a couple of IT people. However, jobs in Antarctica have fierce competition.

Watch the Deepsea Challenge documentary about James Cameron's descent to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. There's very little life due to a lack of energy and nutrients.

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt2332883/

Is Blue Origin's business model exclusively space tourism? If so, I think that's unlikely to sustain them.

SpaceX is busy building the intercontinental railroad to space; if Blue Origin is not building toward a similarly ambitious and lucrative goal it looks like they're going to get left behind.

Did you mean to make an analogy to the "transcontinental railroad"?

Oops, yes.

(Must have been thinking about intercontinental ballistic trains).

Bezos has, for about a decade now, laid out his intention to have Blue Origin put what he calls the heavy lift infrastructure into place to dramatically broaden the use of space for industry. He relates it to the way Amazon didn't have to invent credit card processing, build fiber optic networks, invent operating systems, invent the microprocessor, create UPS and Fedex, et al. before he could start the company. His goal is to provide core space infrastructure so new businesses can be built on top of that. Long-term he believes it's a practical growth requirement to move industry off of earth, that if we don't do so we're condemning ourselves to stagnation.

https://www.geekwire.com/2016/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-space-i...

Their model is not exclusively space tourism. I imagine this is either PR or fundraising (or a mix of the two).

Mainly PR - at $200k/person, you'll be losing millions on every flight.

Yeah, it probably covers operating costs and maybe even a decent chunk of the rocket. Wouldn't come close to touching the big items, R&D, etc.

Non-orbital flight takes ludicrously less power and rocket than getting to orbit. Flying six people per flight would easily be profitable on a per flight basis, ignoring development costs.

And the development stuff is already a paid cost, and a part of reaching the real goal of AWS, but for space.

Blue Origin is building a new full sized rocket motor that will power SpaceX’s main competitor ULA. Blue Origin has also announced that their next rocket, “New Glenn”, will be an orbital class rocket competing with the Falcon 9.

I don’t see where they come up with the estimate of $10 million per flight? Given the full reusability of the rocket, the cost per flight will be far, far below that?

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