Best space tourism company is SpaceX, blue Origin and Virgin Galactic are in a modern space race like when the United States and the Soviet Union competed to get astronauts on the Moon.
Let's start with blue origin.
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| Blue Origin |
The Passion project of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.
Blue Origins focus is on commercial spaceflight or space tourism.
It plans to shoot a booster rocket with an attached passenger capsule to 60 miles above the surface into suborbital space.
At the top of the Rockets Arch, the capsule will detach and for about four minutes passengers will experience weightlessness.
They'll be allowed to unbuckle their seatbelts.
And float around the cabin looking out the window at the curvature of the earth.
The capsule will then start to fall back into the atmosphere and parachutes will deploy to bring it down slowly.
The whole trip only lasts about 11 minutes.
A ticket on blue origin. New Shepherd will likely cost more than $200,000. That's over $18,000 a minute blue.
Origin has tested the New Shepherd rocket 9 times and the company still hopes to send civilians into space in 2018.
Virgin Galactic also aims to make commercial space travel accessible, but the vehicle it's using looks quite different.
Virgin Galactic SS Unity looks more like a plane than a rocket.
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galactic
The ship is made up of the White Knight 2A carrier airplane and Spaceship 2A passenger spaceship.
Spaceship two can carry 6 passengers and two crew members.
The passenger ship detaches from the carrier plane about 9 miles above the earth surface.
The ship then fires its rocket engines to blast about 50 miles further until it reaches suborbital space, like Blue Origin.
Passengers will experience 4 to 5 minutes of weightlessness before the ship reenters the atmosphere.
The total trip.
Should last about 2 1/2 hours.
Virgin Galactic has conducted 3 rocket powered test flights of the SS Unity and it hopes to get its first passengers to space by the end of 2018. Founder Richard Branson will be one of the first people to take the trip, and Virgin Galactic has already sold 700 tickets for future flights costing $250,000.
Elon Musk's company. SpaceX also wants to send people to space. SpaceX is ultimate, goal is to establish colonies on other planets.
The ship SpaceX intends to send to Mars could hold 100 people, and the ride would be a lot longer than 4 minutes.
SpaceX
But SpaceX also plans to send people to space on their way to other earthly destinations. The big Falcon rocket will briefly enter space to make long distance travel shorter, traveling by rocket from New York to Tokyo, for example, would only take 37 minutes, and it would take no more than an hour to get.
Anywhere on earth.
Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic and SpaceX are major players in the modern space race, but there are even more companies out there. It's estimated that space tourism could generate $1.6 billion in revenue in the next decade.
So, no matter which company crosses this finish line first, there will inevitably be another race.
After all, space is infinite.
