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I don't think the aim is for New Shepard to be a sustainable business, you only need maybe a dozen or two launches to gain experience and knowledge to pump back into the New Glen project. If they can have a tourist soak up $200k of the cost, then that's great because the astronaut doesn't actually do a whole lot on these trips, save for being a human guinea pig to send vitals back down.

Once New Glen starts launching in 2020, they want to quickly move past human certification, so practicing with New Shepard is less costly in terms of critical-path length and probably financially too-- bigger rocket, bigger spend per test.

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I don't think a lot of people get this. These "space tourist" companies don't have an end goal as space tourism. The problem with launch vehicle companies (launch PROVIDERS) is that they don't always have something to launch (provide). To sustain your company you need to launch often. Rather, to sustain the low price on your vehicle you need to launch often.

You also need to get to a high TRL for confidence from contractors. People are more willing to take risks than someone sending up $100m+ satellites or vehicles. Those successful human missions get you to a TRL 9 pretty quickly.

But many of these companies have much bigger aims than tourism. Tourism is part of it, but more like orbital hotels, lunar hotels, etc. Not a short trip. But also mining. There's A LOT of money in mining once the vehicles get cheap enough. Which they aren't if you're flying a few times a year (like how most things come down in price when you manufacture at scale).

Nit pick: The point of the ride isn't to get 0 gravity. IT IS TO GO TO SPACE! That has a value much higher than that 5k 0g rides. Sure, 0g is part of it, but that's not why ANYONE is buying a ticket.

> Nit pick: The point of the ride isn't to get 0 gravity.

Yeah, not to mention that this is actually an impossible goal. And if it's the weightlessness sensation you are after, just get a new vomit comet. You need an airplane for that, not a rocket.

> IT IS TO GO TO SPACE!

Yeah, you need a rocket for that. A very small one. Oh, you mean to stay in space? Yeah, now you need a pretty big one.

>Nit pick: The point of the ride isn't to get 0 gravity. IT IS TO GO TO SPACE!

This is an incredibly important and underrated point. People aren't going (just) for the roller coaster ride. They're chasing the overview effect, the perspective-altering thrill of seeing the Earth from space.

I suspect a lot of people will pay handsomely for it. If they do (and it works despite the trip's brevity), prices will steadily drop as design and build costs get amortized away to nothing. Eventually it could be accessible to the majority of people (in developed countries), at least at a level where if you saved up you could get to space once in your lifetime — a sort of secular pilgrimage for the 21st century.

Given the apparent change in the worldviews of those who experience this effect, if we're lucky it might even help make the world a little bit better.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_effect

https://www.overviewinstituteaustralia.org/the-overview-effe...

8 people out of 536 that have gone to space report the overview effect. That's not necessarily a huge impact.

The eight examples mentioned in the Wikipedia page are far from an exhaustive list. They don't include many examples from the original Frank White book, to start. (White also defines it quite broadly, to include the feeling you get in an airplane when watching tiny cars moving along the ground.)

Even if the hit rate is low, that doesn't necessarily deter thrill-seekers. 4,800 people have successfully climbed Mt. Everest (8,300 times[0]) at the cost of tens of thousands of dollars ($45k-70k[1], $11k for the royalty alone[2]), and the very real risk of death (375 deaths). The success rate is about half,[3] up from under 30% before 2006.[4]

[0] http://www.alanarnette.com/blog/2017/12/17/everest-by-the-nu...

[1] https://www.alpineascents.com/climbs/mount-everest/price-sch...

[2] Down from $25k before 2014 https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/02/140219-moun...

[3] https://www.quora.com/How-many-people-attempt-to-climb-Mt-Ev...

[4] https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/everest-by-the-numbers/in...

It will be the ultimate Wealthy Boy ride/experience.

It's too bad the average scientist, especially astronomers, astrophysicists won't be able to afford to ride the ride?

(I'm not suspose to bring up the wealth divide in America, but it's been just so---what's the word--obvious. I'm at the point where I'm thinking about the future. A future where companies will just cater to the small percentage of the population with the biggest wad? Yea--I'm envious. )

At first this will be true, as with many new products. But as hardware and development costs are amortized over time and competitors enter the market, we can expect prices to drop to marginal cost. That could easily be in reach of ordinary people, somewhere in the 5 digits. (I don't believe the $10 million estimate quoted elsewhere below for a second — and the 'analyst' who made it offhand in a quote to a news organization doesn't seem to have backed it up anywhere.)

By the way, your account has been dead for a very long time. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14766847

You can perhaps get the same effect by riding a U2 spy plane. I remember seeing a video (this one I believe [1]) where journalist James May got to ride one and you could hear the elation in his voice. "Like a view to eternity... Nothing like twice the altitude of an airliner." Welcome to the world of high flight indeed.

[1] https://youtu.be/1PmYItnlY5M

Same curved earth perspective when Adam from MythBusters flew in a U2: https://www.facebook.com/MythBusters/videos/adam's-u2-flight...

This is really a good point about going to space. People pay 20K USD to fly MIG-25 in Russia. One does not get zero g on those flights, so money covers the thrill of observing Earth at 25 km at 1750 mph.

You can get perhaps a minute of zero g on a MiG-25, that's just not what people ride it for.

In that case the smart money would be in orbital transfer. The oversupply of capacity to get to low earth orbit will create a demand to go further.

If the object really is

> a dozen or two launches to gain experience and knowledge to pump back into the New Glen project

then it's probably cheaper to never fly a tourist. It's not great if the revenue from tourists is smaller than the opportunity cost of making the thing safe for tourists.

Indeed, I think one important factor that is overlooked is that they are gaining experience in manned launches, sub orbital or not once you put a person on a rocket it’s a whole new ball game.

This is can in the long run give them an advantage over SpaceX depending on how fast SpaceX can actually shift towards manned launches.

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