{"id":17548,"date":"2021-05-20T01:11:47","date_gmt":"2021-05-19T17:11:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/bidding-for-the-first-journey-on-blue-origins-suborbital-spaceship-exceeds-2-million\/"},"modified":"2021-05-20T01:11:47","modified_gmt":"2021-05-19T17:11:47","slug":"bidding-for-the-first-journey-on-blue-origins-suborbital-spaceship-exceeds-2-million","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/bidding-for-the-first-journey-on-blue-origins-suborbital-spaceship-exceeds-2-million\/","title":{"rendered":"Bidding for the first journey on Blue Origin\u2019s suborbital spaceship exceeds $2 million"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure id=\"attachment_599489\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-599489\" style=\"width: 630px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full-width wp-image-599489\" src=\"https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/210114-blue1-630x461.jpg\" alt=\"New Shepard ascent\" width=\"630\" height=\"461\" srcset=\"https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/210114-blue1-630x461.jpg 630w, https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/210114-blue1-768x562.jpg 768w, https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/210114-blue1.jpg 956w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 630px) 100vw, 630px\"><figcaption data-nosnippet=\"\" id=\"caption-attachment-599489\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard spaceship ascends from its West Texas launch pad for a January test flight. (Blue Origin via YouTube)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin space venture has begun unsealing the bids for an open seat on its New Shepard suborbital spaceship, and the high bid hit the $2.8 million mark with more than three weeks to go in the online auction.<\/p>\n<p>Blue Origin says the auction has drawn out more than 5,200 bidders from 136 countries \u2014 including yours truly, who most definitely does not have the high bid. Bidding started on May 5 and will conclude with a live auction on June 12. Proceeds from the sale will be donated to Blue Origin\u2019s educational foundation, the Club for the Future.<\/p>\n<p>The winner will fill one of the six seats on New Shepard\u2019s first crewed flight to the edge of space from Blue Origin\u2019s West Texas spaceport, currently scheduled for July 20, the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. The other seats will presumably be set aside for Blue Origin employees or VIPs.<\/p>\n<p>Passengers on the autonomously controlled New Shepard craft would experience a minutes-long shot of weightlessness and an astronaut\u2019s-eye view of the curving Earth beneath the black sky of space. At the end of the ride, New Shepard\u2019s crew capsule would make a soft landing with the aid of a parachute and a retrorocket blast, while the booster would make a separate autonomous touchdown.<\/p>\n<p><iframe title=\"An experience unlike any other\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/bOu4dQOCEfs?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen=\"\" data-ratio=\"0.5625\" data-width=\"800\" data-height=\"450\" style=\"display: block; margin: 0px; width: 800px; height: 450px;\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Blue Origin has been putting a series of reusable New Shepard spacecraft through uncrewed flight tests for six years, and after the last such test in April, Bezos declared that \u201cit\u2019s time\u201d to put people on board.<\/p>\n<p>When the high bid was made public for the first time today, the amount stood at $1.4 million, and it didn\u2019t take long for the bids to click upward from there. There\u2019s probably a premium for the first ride and the bragging rights that come with it. Nevertheless, a multimillion-dollar bid is likely to set a price point for suborbital space rides that\u2019s significantly higher than previously expected.<\/p>\n<p>Virgin Galactic has about 600 reservations for its SpaceShipTwo suborbital space plane that were sold for as much as $250,000, and says it plans to raise the price tag for future reservations. Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic both say their tour package would include the flight itself as well as a few days of pre-launch preparation.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s not yet clear whether Blue Origin will continue using the auction model to sell seats on its spaceship for future flights. But whatever the price turns out to be, it\u2019s still likely to be much less than the price of a days-long orbital space trip. The ticket price being charged by SpaceX for trips on its Crew Dragon spaceship is said to amount to tens of millions of dollars.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard spaceship ascends from its West Texas launch pad for a January test flight. (Blue Origin via YouTube) Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin space venture has begun unsealing the bids for an open seat on its New Shepard suborbital spaceship, and the high bid hit the $2.8 million mark with more [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[509,1250,493],"class_list":["post-17548","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-blue-origin","tag-new-shepard","tag-space-tourism"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17548"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17548"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17548\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}