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Seeing it live indeed felt like it was so short. This is a milestone for that company, but not a milestone for much else: it really looked useless. Let's hope

Seeing it live indeed felt like it was so short. This is a milestone for that company, but not a milestone for much else: it really looked useless. Let's hope they will extend their technology for something bigger than this.

sgt 5y ago
Sending people up is a good and solid first step. You can't really be doing or planning seriously ambitious stuff if you can't send people up 100 km. That's what they proved today.
- ASalazarMX 5y ago
  I still think it's a fruitless waste of resources. At a quarter million per ticket, only the richest people can afford them. Maybe it will become more affordable in the future, so you can spend $50,000 and enjoy grazing space in a 20-30 people capsule. Maybe I don't have their vision, but this kind of space tourism seems like a dead end. Not useful enough to replace planes, not powerful enough to actually go to space. Maybe a testbed for space technologies?
  - frabcus 5y ago
    Profit to fund orbital technologies?
  - t0mbstone 5y ago
    ANY kind of competition in the field of space travel should be welcome. I think you are seriously underestimating the demand for a truly safe platform for shuttling people and payloads from earth's surface to outer space. Space is the final frontier, and we are literally just getting started. The more groups that are working on the problem, the better!
    - ASalazarMX 5y ago
      > I think you are seriously underestimating the demand for a truly safe platform for shuttling people and payloads from earth's surface to outer space. Most likely I am. It seems like the logical progression would be increasingly bigger rockets to actually round-trip regularly to, say, the Moon, or a space station. Elon Musk has always made clear his final goal of colonizing Mars, while Branson and Bezos seem to have less defined goals.
      - t0mbstone 5y ago
        Blue Origin is also working on New Glenn (a much larger reusable rocket), as well as Blue Moon (a flexible moon lander). I suspect that Bezos is following a little bit of the same playbook with Blue Origin that he did with Amazon. Amazon isn't just an online retailer. It's also an open marketplace for independent sellers. Additionally, all of the technology behind the scenes (the AWS platform) is being resold and used by countless other companies (generating a huge chunk of Amazon's revenue). By focusing on building these reusable components (with no single defined goal), I suspect that Bezos is envisioning a space "road" which will be utilized by third parties as they see fit. If you notice, they even use this "space road" terminology on the marketing for New Glenn. If a private company wants to start their own mining base on the moon, for example, they could simply pay Blue Origin to ship their building supplies there. They could then play Blue Origin to shuttle their people there. If Blue Origin can actually provide a safe and reliable "toll road" for third parties to get to space, they will make billions/trillions in the long run off of it. Edit: I just found something interesting to support this theory. Apparently Jeff Bezos recently stated that "We Need to Move All Polluting Industry Into Space". Now just imagine how much money Blue Origin would make from shuttling all those third party materials and people to and from space...

sgt 5y ago

Sending people up is a good and solid first step. You can't really be doing or planning seriously ambitious stuff if you can't send people up 100 km. That's what they proved today.

ASalazarMX 5y ago
I still think it's a fruitless waste of resources. At a quarter million per ticket, only the richest people can afford them. Maybe it will become more affordable in the future, so you can spend $50,000 and enjoy grazing space in a 20-30 people capsule. Maybe I don't have their vision, but this kind of space tourism seems like a dead end. Not useful enough to replace planes, not powerful enough to actually go to space. Maybe a testbed for space technologies?
- frabcus 5y ago
  Profit to fund orbital technologies?
- t0mbstone 5y ago
  ANY kind of competition in the field of space travel should be welcome. I think you are seriously underestimating the demand for a truly safe platform for shuttling people and payloads from earth's surface to outer space. Space is the final frontier, and we are literally just getting started. The more groups that are working on the problem, the better!
  - ASalazarMX 5y ago
    > I think you are seriously underestimating the demand for a truly safe platform for shuttling people and payloads from earth's surface to outer space. Most likely I am. It seems like the logical progression would be increasingly bigger rockets to actually round-trip regularly to, say, the Moon, or a space station. Elon Musk has always made clear his final goal of colonizing Mars, while Branson and Bezos seem to have less defined goals.
    - t0mbstone 5y ago
      Blue Origin is also working on New Glenn (a much larger reusable rocket), as well as Blue Moon (a flexible moon lander). I suspect that Bezos is following a little bit of the same playbook with Blue Origin that he did with Amazon. Amazon isn't just an online retailer. It's also an open marketplace for independent sellers. Additionally, all of the technology behind the scenes (the AWS platform) is being resold and used by countless other companies (generating a huge chunk of Amazon's revenue). By focusing on building these reusable components (with no single defined goal), I suspect that Bezos is envisioning a space "road" which will be utilized by third parties as they see fit. If you notice, they even use this "space road" terminology on the marketing for New Glenn. If a private company wants to start their own mining base on the moon, for example, they could simply pay Blue Origin to ship their building supplies there. They could then play Blue Origin to shuttle their people there. If Blue Origin can actually provide a safe and reliable "toll road" for third parties to get to space, they will make billions/trillions in the long run off of it. Edit: I just found something interesting to support this theory. Apparently Jeff Bezos recently stated that "We Need to Move All Polluting Industry Into Space". Now just imagine how much money Blue Origin would make from shuttling all those third party materials and people to and from space...