I don’t keep up with Blue Origin, have they demonstrated the ability to do this safely?
On the other hand, Blue Origin's competitor Virgin Galactic isn't automated and looks a lot more dangerous.
I thought that the failure rate for manned missions was accepted to be around 1 crew loss in several hundred flights. That seems much worse than typical mountain climbing, with Everest and K2 being somewhat riskier than space flight on a per-attempt basis.
That said, suborbital flight is substantially safer.
[1] 0.54 fatal incidents per 100,000 flight hours and decreasing year on year: https://www.faa.gov/news/fact_sheets/news_story.cfm?newsId=2...
Sources: http://www.spacelaunchreport.com/logyear.html
Everest: https://www.washington.edu/news/2020/08/26/mount-everest-sum...
SpaceX: https://spacex-info.com/stats/
They're required to have contingency plans in case something happens to him, but they can't keep him from going. Not that they would if they could.
They just don’t have the marketing skills of someone like a Spacex.
Each BO test I've watched has been very well presented and seemingly marketed - it's just that at this point, frankly, what they're doing is of less interest than that what SpaceX has accomplished.
The rationale for getting into the game seemed more like, "Well, this space thing seems like an emerging market, and we can't be a true monopoly unless we have a tentacle in it, too."
Blue Origin are very far away from achieving anything comparable to even SpaceX first Falcon-1 flight from 2008.