Blue Origin: 100 thousand kilometers from the earth to open the wings to space tourism

When Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket launches former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos into space, a seat will be occupied by the first paying passenger on a space trip: 18-year-old Oliver Daemen, a Dutch physics student and son of Joes Daemen, founder of the major private equity real estate of the Netherlands with a net worth of over $ 500 million. He is not the mysterious buyer who won the ticket at auction: to know his identity we will have to wait a little longer, since he would have postponed the trip due to “scheduling conflicts”, reserving to leave on a later flight. Oliver’s trip was a gift from his father, determined to fulfill the lifelong dream of his son who, he says, “from the age of four has been fascinated by space, the moon and rockets”. Oliver will fly aboard the New Shepard spacecraft over 100km above Earth in suborbital space. He will be the youngest passenger on a journey into space, in good company: with him will be, in addition to his brothers Jeff and Mark Bezos, also Wally Funk, an 82-year-old former aviator and flight teacher who, 61 years after having had to give up his mission as a woman, she lives her revenge as a guest of honor and as an older space traveler. A passenger of high symbolic value, as well as the date chosen for the flight: the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. New Shephard, capable of carrying up to six passengers, will carry its crew to a height of over 100 thousand kilometers, giving thanks to its panoramic windows a spectacular view of the earth and a few minutes in zero gravity before reversing the course. A world in which suborbital travel will be open to the general public, however, is still far away. The decrease in costs must go hand in hand with a greater demand from the public. For Bank of America aerospace analysts, “The only way to reach critical volume is to make space travel part of a transportation network,” they explain, “not just as an experience in itself, but for example to get from New York to Tokyo in a couple of hours at the most ”. This could really be the future of space travel, then, and Virgin Galactic has for some time been exploring the possibility of launching commercial flights that use the same technology to connect distant points of the globe in a few hours at supersonic speed. A project in which the Swiss investment company UBS also believes very much: “The air travel sector that lasts over 10 hours is ready to be cannibalized”, they commented. And if the price of the ticket could be brought down to around 2,500 dollars, converting even just 5% of travelers who routinely travel those routes to suborbital travel, the market would have a value of 20 billion dollars a year. Bank of America’s estimate of $ 2,500 hypothesized by UBS is too low to be realistic in the near future, but in their opinion there is a world of business travelers who already spend around $ 20,000 on their business trips. , and they would be willing to pay a premium rate to dramatically shorten the time. What is missing now is the technology capable of bringing more passengers into orbit for each journey. Not something that will happen in the next few years, but not even the dream of an impossible future.