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Comment by tjpnz | Hacker News Reader

Why isn't anyone adopting Astra's simple, no thrills approach and applying it to suborbital tourist flights? Blue Origin are only using New Shepard to please hand-picked celebrities while testing their capsule for mating to New Glenn (hence the current phallic appearance), and Virgin Galactic are doing.. well god knows what. Build something small and simple for 2-4 people and launch it around the clock from multiple sites across the world. If it could be offered as a 20-50k carnival ride there would be no shortage of willing customers.

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> But then, rockets started failing. Only two of the seven launches of the company's "Rocket 3" vehicle were successful.

I would personally rather not have some no frills, go fast and break things startup destroy space tourism before it has even started.

Can I interest you in a submarine tourist ride to see the Titanic instead perhaps? <grin>

You jest but I think this will be in the back of the mind of any rich person looking to do things like fly to space for a long time. Rightfully so.

Small, simple, and 2-4 people combine poorly. I think the closest is the venerable Soyuz-2 rocket that has been built and flown in hundreds, without drastic changes.

It was used for space tourism.a few times, but it's still too expensive, even at $30M per launch (without an orbital vehicle though).

Soyuz isn't reusable and doesn't take advantage of recent advances in manufacturing. I recently saw a capsule flown three years ago and could see the hand beaten panels and ruler marks from the people who were cutting the metal and welding it together by hand. Building them like that will be expensive.

Because building a human capable machine is expensive and its hard to sell tickets to rich people if you kill like 50% of them.

Astra approach literally resulted in them not having a reliable rocket ever. Ever rocket they ever build had issues.

Simply put, human suborbital is barley a real market at all. Its unlikely anybody will make a profit of it. And given the Blue Origin has infinity money and no need for revenue. And VO has scammed the stock market out of 100 of million of $.

Entering in that market would be crazy, you are not Jeff Bezos and you can't scam the stock market again. And anybody smart isn't gone invest in this terrible market.

Could we have a decade or two of expensive civilian spaceflight to work out the kinks before Ryanair get involved ?

It feels odd to gatekeep a term that is already quite dismissive, but… is it even really tourism? You don’t stay in the place really, the entire thing is spent on transit. I think carnival ride is the right phrase, and… I dunno, I’m poor, but a $20k carnival ride sounds nuts to me.

"Tour" doesn't necessarily imply staying at a place - if you tour a factory for example then you don't usually spend the night there.

Tourism usually involves visiting a location, though, not just flying through it.

Is it that different to people who'll fly to New Zealand to go bungy jumping?

I think so, they get out of the plane when they get to New Zealand, right? This is more like flying over New Zealand.

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