Blue Origin's rocket will be ready for riders next year. Tickets are seriously expensive
Jeff Bezos' rocket will take tourists to the boundary of space.
- National Silver Azbee Award for Impact/Investigative Journalism; National Gold Azbee Award for Online Single Topic Coverage by a Team; National Bronze Azbee Award for Web Feature Series
A New Shepard rocket lands at Blue Origin's facility in Texas.
Blue Origin has pushed its timeline to send tourists to space back a year to 2020, CEO Bob Smith told CNBC in an interview published Tuesday. The rocket company, founded by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in 2000, is testing commercial space flights that would take passengers on an 11-minute flight to the boundary of space on its New Shepard rocket.
"We were planning on this year; unfortunately, it's very unlikely we're going to get in this year. We need a few more flights to make sure that we're all comfortable with the verification," Smith told CNBC. "We hold ourselves to very, very high standards here, we're never going to fly until we're absolutely ready. I think we have a very, very good amount of confidence around the system itself, I think it is working very, very well. But we have to go look at all the analysis, and then convince ourselves that we're ready to go. ... So it probably will be next year."
A ticket to space on Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket will initially be priced in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, Smith said. "We're going to start at a high price point and go down from there."
Blue Origin will have some competition in the world of space tourism: Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic is planning its first commercial space flight for May 2020. However, since both companies have experienced delays, it remains unclear when exactly that goal will become a reality.
Blue Origin didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
