Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is making rapid progress on his plan to leave all of us poor suckers behind on this godforsaken planet, and he plans to start selling tickets for suborbital space flights in 2019. On Friday, a new report claimed that the right to be a Blue Origin guinea pig will cost $200,000 to $300,000.
Private space company Blue Origin announced that it plans to sell suborbital spaceflight tickets to aspiring space tourists starting next year. No price was given, but the company said it expects to conduct the first passenger tests of the New Shepard launch system “soon.”
In a move that should come as a surprise to absolutely no one, SpaceX is postponing its plan to send a pair of private citizens on a trip around the Moon.
In the halcyon days of yore, people put away money with the hopes of retiring somewhere warm, where they could argue about chicken salad with other curmudgeons until they expired. But very soon, the new retirement hotspot might be on Mars. While billionaires like Elon Musk have long touted human settlement of the Red…
The dick measuring contest space race between tech titans Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk has been brewing for years, but recently, things have intensified to comic book levels of absurdity. Almost immediately after SpaceX announced it’d be sending two private citizens around the moon next year, Jeff Bezos fired back by…
On Monday, SpaceX founder Elon Musk announced that for the first time in history, it will be sending two private citizens on a trip around the Moon, in a Dragon 2 spacecraft. Because sending untrained civilians into space apparently isn’t enough of a gamble, Musk added that this mission would be taking place in Q4 of…
Two years ago, Virgin Galactic’s SpaceshipTwo, the space plane it hoped to use to send tourists into space, failed on a test flight and crashed in the desert. Now, it’s revealed a brand new version of SpaceShipTwo.
Whether they’re selling tickets to orbit or making sure the science funding keeps flowing, rocket companies and space agencies alike have a vested interest in getting the public jazzed about the cosmic beyond. So it’s no surprise that we’re now entering a golden age of space tourism propaganda—one that’s bringing back…
If you build it, the space tourists will come. That was the promise to the taxpayers of New Mexico back in 2009 when Spaceport America broke ground. Seven years and roughly $220 million later, New Mexico has little to show for it. And now the private space facility is asking for even more money.
Space tourism sounds pretty fun, if exorbitantly expensive. The ticket to ride is far from the only pricy thing about it. Building a spaceport for launches and returns costs hundreds of millions. So why does Sir Richard Branson now want to build one in the UK, right after finishing one in America—which isn’t even…
Hard to believe, but it’s been one year since SpaceShipTwo disintegrated during a test flight, killing one pilot and seriously injuring the other. Undaunted by the tragedy, Virgin Galactic has been hard at work building the second version of the suborbital rocket plane—a slightly modified version that may finally…
Last year, Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo crashed catastrophically above the Mojave desert, killing one of its pilots. Now, the pilot of White Knight Two, which carried SpaceShipTwo to altitude, has spoken out about what happened on the day.
Her website is still awesomely space-themed, but soprano Sarah Brightman, who owned Broadway in the 1980s thanks to Cats and Phantom of the Opera, is scratching from her planned space-tourist trip to the ISS. She’d hoped to be “the first professional musician in history to perform live from orbit.”
Investigators are still trying to figure out exactly what went wrong with the tragic crash of Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo. While the National Transportation Safety Board has been looking into an issue with the braking system, the agency has released details from surviving pilot Peter Siebold about how he managed to…
Investigators looking into Friday's tragic crash of SpaceShipTwo are saying that a safety device on the Virgin Galactic spacecraft had been deployed prematurely — and that it may have gone off spontaneously.
Yesterday, somewhere in the Mojave desert, investigators began the long process of understanding the events that led to the tragic accident that killed one pilot and left another injured. And even after they finish, plenty of questions about the future of the commercial space industry will remain. But the one we'll…
Do you want to go to space? Of course you do, and the fun thing is you (probably) can—if you have a shitload of money. The good news is that space tourism is getting cheaper and easier, so it's entirely likely that you might be able to afford it one day. But you probably don't want to say goodbye to Earth quite yet.
Arizona-based World View has conducted a successful test of a scale model of its high-altitude balloon system. It ascended to a height of 120,000 feet (36 km) — a vantage point from where the darkness of space and the curvature of Earth can be seen.
Billing themselves as "The premier travel agency for interplanetary adventure vacations," this guerrilla-science project is organizing a tour of the US and the UK. At each destination, they'll open an Intergalactic Travel Bureau to entice people into learning about planetary science.
Space tourism sounds exciting and unforgettable and all, but with a single trip costing as much as a small house, it's simply out of reach for the average person. A company called Paragon Space Development Corp is hoping to change that with a new, more affordable ticket to space. It'll cost as much as a slightly…
