- Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket reached an altitude of 66 miles above the surface
- Virgin Galactic's VSS Unity used mothership VMS Eve to fly 53.5 miles above the Earth's surface
- The VSS Unity is like NASA's Space Shuttle, traveling space after being flown via its mothership, the VMS Eve
- Blue Origin's New Shepard is a much more traditional rocket
- Blue Origin's trip lasted just over 10 minutes, while Virgin's trip lasted 90 minutes
- Once it reached 50,000ft, VSS Unity landed on a runway like a traditional airplane
- The New Shepard capsule fell to Earth, parachutes opened and thrusters fired to cushion the touchdown blow
- Blue Origin could charge around $200,000 to fly to space, while Virgin Galactic is charging $250,000
- Branson flew to space with three other mission specialists and two pilots
- On Blue Origin's autonomous flight, Bezos was joined by his brother Mark and the oldest and youngest astronauts
Blue Origin's Jeff Bezos and Virgin Galactic's Sir Richard Branson have both now been to space, albeit in very different ways.
Bezos and three other astronauts, including his brother Mark, took off from their base at Van Horn, Texas, at 9.12am EST on Tuesday, the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, 12 minutes behind schedule. They ascended for four minutes before the New Shepard rocket booster separated from their capsule, leaving them floating in zero gravity for four minutes.
They then returned to Earth with parachutes controlling the pace of their descent, touching down in the Texas desert at 9.22am EST, 10 minutes and 20 seconds after liftoff.
The 10 minute journey cost $5.5billion - $550million per minute. Bezos, who stepped down as Amazon CEO earlier this year and will now split his time between Blue Origin and his environmental charity, said at a press conference after the flight: 'For every Amazon customer, you guys paid for all this so thank you from the bottom of my heart.'
Branson, 70, pumped his fists in the air after returning from space, as he stepped onto the runway in New Mexico before skipping towards his daughter Holly's twins Etta and Artie and scooping them up in his arms.
Branson, who said he had dreamed about travelling to space since childhood, shared a group hug with the rest of his family including his wife Joan Templeman, his son Sam and granddaughter Eva-Deia.
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| In contrast, Virgin Galactic is mostly focusing on the space tourism business, though it has spoken about using its 'proprietary technologies and capabilities for other commercial and governmental uses' |
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| The business models of the two companies overlap in space tourism, but Blue Origin has far greater ambitions than Virgin Galactic, including becoming more like SpaceX, Boeing and Lockheed Martin I'M A BUSINESS, MAN The business models of the two companies overlap in space tourism, but Blue Origin has far greater ambitions than Virgin Galactic. At the end of 2020, Virgin Galactic had more than 600 paying customers and another 700 refundable deposits for its flights. In addition to space tourism, the company is going to use its 'proprietary technologies and capabilities for other commercial and governmental uses,' according to its fourth-quarter 2020 earnings report. It also sees opportunities 'to develop high speed global mobility vehicles that drastically reduce travel time for point-to-point travel,' akin to being able to send customers from Los Angeles to Tokyo in a couple of hours, according to Yahoo Finance. Other potential applications of the company's technology includes being a high-speed testbed, alternating the mothership configurations and high-altitude platforms. The publicly traded Virgin Galactic reported an operating loss of $275 million in 2020 and a loss of $213 million in 2019. In its most recent quarterly results, the company had a net loss of $130 million, falling well short of analysts' estimates. In contrast, privately held Blue Origin is pining for the lucrative area of government contracts, competing with Elon Musk's SpaceX in the matter. According to The Wall Street Journal, SpaceX has received $2.8 billion in 52 contracts from NASA and the Pentagon over the past 14 federal fiscal years. By comparison, Blue Origin, founded in 2000, has received $496.5 million in 33 contracts. The company has goals of becoming a 'company like SpaceX, like Boeing, like Lockheed Martin,' John Logsdon, the former director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University told The Journal. That ambition includes building reusable space vehicles Bezos told CNBC, similar to what Musk and SpaceX have already done with its Falcon line of rockets. 'If you want to be a space entrepreneur today, you have to do everything from the beginning,' Bezos told the news outlet. 'There's no real infrastructure that's at an affordable cost. So that's what we have to do, is build that kind of infrastructure and then future generations will get to rest on top of it.' Both Blue Origin and SpaceX are aiming to get their portion of a space market - including moon landings, asteroid mining and space tourism - that could be worth as much as $1 trillion by 2040, according to analysis from Morgan Stanley. |