Blue Origin, a private cosmic company, is now all-out in making space tourism happen. The first batch of passengers can do the trip as early as 2018. Indeed, dreams do come true.
New Shepard, the reusable shuttle, recently unveiled its first interior photos. Inside the luxurious crew capsule, tourists could float around weightless for a few minutes. New Shepard was already launched and landed for five times, but no manned mission has ever occurred.
Hopefully, space tourism can finally debut next year. For one thing, The Verge reported that a mockup of the capsule will be shown to the media on April 3 and 6. It will roll out at the 33rd Space Symposium in Colorado Springs.
Meanwhile, it is important to note that New Shepard is different from the Space X Dragon Capsule because of the nature of their missions. The latter is basically used to send supplies to the International Space Station. Though, CEO Elon Musk earlier announced that he plans to send two tourists around the moon using the Dragon capsule soon.
For his part, Blue Origin head Jeff Bezos said that every seat in New Shepard is "a window seat." These are reclining models with blue piping. The company logo is a feather to symbolize a flight "with grace and power."
According to Mashable, Blue Origin aims to fly "paying" customers for up to 100 kilometers high. This area is known to be the edge of Earth's atmosphere. The capsule will then come down through a set of huge parachutes.
While the exact ticket price is not yet clear, people expect that it will not come cheap. For example, Virgin Galactic sold seats aboard its own SpaceShipTwo for $250,000. The latter is another private company that aims to showcase galactic trips. Sadly, it has not yet launched any space travel to date.
