Analysis

What Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic offer may be best described as 'space rides'. Passengers neither undergo astronaut training nor fly the craft, which is automated in Blue Origin's case and flown by a professional pilot in Virgin Galactic's.

Both vehicles are 'suborbital', meaning that their engines cannot achieve enough speed to enter orbit. However, they reach heights where the sky appears black because the atmosphere is thin, and passengers feel weightless for several minutes as their vehicle stops accelerating and begins to fall.

Richard Branson

Branson founded Virgin Galactic in 2004. He initially aimed to offer passenger flights from 2007, but fatal accidents in 2007 and 2014 caused delays. The firm began selling ticket reservations 14 years ago and has collected an estimated USD80mn in deposits. Tickets cost USD250,000 each.

SpaceShipTwo flew to space for the first time in 2018. The next year, the firm listed on the New York Stock Exchange through a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) (see INTERNATIONAL: SPAC investment model is flawed - January 8, 2021).

The Virgin conglomerate includes another space company, Virgin Orbit, founded in 2017, which launches small satellites from beneath the wing of a modified Boeing 747. This method avoids the need for a launch pad, potentially allowing launches from a wider range of locations, cutting costs and increasing flexibility. Air-launch capability has strategic implications too: launch pads are fixed targets whereas aircraft are not.

Virgin Orbit achieved its first orbital launch in January. It is expected to announce a USD3bn SPAC listing in the coming weeks.

Jeff Bezos

Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000. He is its sole owner and funded it with an unknown amount (possibly in the billions) from his private fortune.

Unlike Branson, Bezos can credibly claim to be a lifelong space enthusiast with a long-term vision of human expansion beyond earth. He sees the New Shepard, which has reached space many times since 2015 but never carried passengers before, as a small first step that will develop core technology and begin making Blue Origin financially self-sustaining. He claims to have sold USD100mn worth of passenger tickets, for undisclosed prices.

Other Blue Origin projects probably have greater commercial significance. The company is building a new rocket engine for United Launch Alliance, the main competitor to SpaceX for US government launch contracts, and a powerful orbital rocket of its own. It is also developing a robotic lander, the Blue Moon, to carry cargo to and from the moon. A modified design was a serious contender for a contract to carry NASA's next astronauts to the moon, but ultimately lost to SpaceX (see UNITED STATES: Starship success will bolster SpaceX - May 6, 2021).

A separate space venture established by Amazon in 2019, Kuiper Systems, is developing a constellation of 3,000 satellites to provide global high-speed internet coverage (see INT: Satellite internet promises global impact - August 23, 2019).

Kuiper appears to be a direct competitor to SpaceX's Starlink constellation, and the two have clashed publicly over attempts to reserve access to certain orbits.

Elon Musk

The most successful space start-up by far is SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk (net worth USD161bn) in 2002.

SpaceX focused from the outset on the satellite launch market, which it thoroughly disrupted. It built the world's first vertical-landing rockets and within a few years of its first commercial launch in 2013 had seized the lion's share of what was by 2019 a USD10bn market. It also won multi-billion-dollar NASA contracts to resupply the International Space Station and later to carry astronauts there, which it did for the first time last year.

SpaceX does not market tourist rides, but has sold seats on four launches to a firm called Axiom, which offers brief stays on the International Space Station to privately funded astronauts for an estimated USD55mn per person as part of NASA's efforts to commercialise the space station (see INTERNATIONAL: NASA to pursue private space stations - September 16, 2019).

SpaceX also has two potentially game-changing projects under way.

The first is the Starship-Super Heavy, which will be the most powerful rocket ever built. It is envisaged as a reusable, multi-purpose launch vehicle, able to carry equipment and crews to earth orbit, the moon and eventually Mars and back. Its first orbital test is imminent. In March, the firm won a USD2.9bn contract for a Starship to carry the next NASA astronauts to the surface of the moon.

The other project is Starlink, a satellite 'mega-constellation' intended to provide high-speed internet access worldwide. Starting in 2019, 1,664 Starlink satellites have been launched of an intended 12,000 or more. Amazon's Kuiper, by contrast, is yet to launch even one.

Backlash

Bezos's space ride elicited both celebration and criticism. Concerns about climate change and inequality supplemented the decades-old argument that money spent on space would be better used on earth. Congressman Earl Blumenauer proposed legislating for an emissions tax on space tourism launches.

The symbolism of the space billionaires' activities plays into politics on both the right and left. The former cite them as a triumph of the private sector, proof that private enterprise can do anything government can. The latter counter that government put people in space 60 years earlier and present Bezos's trip as the epitome of a super-rich elite squandering unjustly amassed wealth in self-indulgent and irresponsible ways.

Musk has dodged the criticism levelled at Bezos. He shows no sign that he intends to fly in space himself, works closely with NASA and has green credentials on account of his association with Tesla and SolarCity. The terrestrial relevance of the Starlink internet service is obvious.

Mass transit

Branson's claim that Virgin Galactic will make space travel available to everyone is far-fetched. Humans will never travel into orbit in large numbers without completely new launch technology. It is simply too expensive.

More realistic is 'point-to-point' travel, in which vehicles resembling airliners carry people and goods between different locations on earth, passing through space en route like ballistic missiles. This might achieve the economies of scale necessary for a mass market.

Though a distant prospect, it is taken seriously. NASA last year partnered with Virgin Galactic to begin exploring it, Japan's science ministry this year issued a road map for public-private collaboration to develop and commercialise it over the next two decades and SpaceX envisages point-to-point passenger versions of the Starship.