Yet its high profile means it has a powerful and widespread influence over the space industry, with investors often pointing to astronaut flights as driving excitement about the broader consequences of the extraterrestrial marketplace.īlue Origin has sold nearly $100 million worth of tickets for future passenger flights to the edge of space, Bezos said last week. The tourism market is just one component of a space economy valued no less than $420 billion.
Branson’s Virgin Galactic, which also recently completed a crewed flight, has historically sold seats on its flights between $200,000 and $250,000 per ticket. Right now, Bezos and fellow billionaire Richard Branson are the only two major entrepreneurs in the market of launching tourists to the edge of space. He and his fellow passengers floated in microgravity for a couple of minutes before their capsule returned and landed after 10 minutes and 10 seconds. Billionaire Jeff Bezos is offering NASA a 2 billion discount from his rocket firm Blue Origin if the agency gives his company a contract to build a human lunar landing system. “Without competition, a short time into the contract, NASA will find itself with limited options as it attempts to negotiate missed deadlines, design changes, and cost overruns.”īezos, the founder and executive chair of Amazon, launched into space earlier this month with a ride on the first crewed New Shepard rocket flight, a project of his Blue Origin company. “Instead of this single source approach, NASA should embrace its original strategy of competition,” Bezos said. Before selecting the winner of the contest, NASA gave 10-month study contracts to SpaceX, Blue Origin and Dynetics to begin work on lunar landers. NASA in April awarded Elon Musk’s SpaceX with a sole $2.89 billion contract to build the next crewed lunar lander under its Human Landing Systems program.
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