The folks over at The Drive posited an interesting question today: Will Jeff Bezos’s Blue Horizon beat Elon Musk and SpaceX into the manned spaceflight business?
It certainly seems plausible, particularly given the seemingly flawless test flight last month of Blue Origin’s “Crew Capsule 2.0” from the company’s test facility in West Texas. (If you haven’t seen the video from inside the capsule, or the dramatic vertical landing of the “New Shepard” reusable rocket, have a look.) Bezos and his team plan another uncrewed test flight in April followed by what could be the first crewed mission in August. The company is extremely secretive about its schedule, however, so exact launch dates and times are TBD.
While SpaceX has been successfully launching its Falcon vehicles into orbit since 2008, and has been sending cargo versions of its Dragon capsule to the International Space Station since 2012, its crew capsule has yet to leave the ground. The Drive’s Eric Adams says that would seem to give Blue Origin an edge in the race to become the first U.S. commercial company to launch tourists toward the stars.
Blue Origin’s launch vehicle, dubbed "New Shepard," has only flown a handful of times in several versions, and only once in 2017, in a test flight on December 12. But that flight was as significant as anything SpaceX has done this year—if for no other reason than the flight demonstrated the performance of the new Crew Capsule 2.0, signaling that the Bezos rocket could realistically be the first of the two companies to carry living humans into space. The company expects its first engineers and pilots to fly in the craft some time this year, possibly beating Musk to the manned space flight stage. SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule—the passenger-carrying version of the cargo capsule it’s been using to shuffle gear to the International Space Station—hasn’t flown yet at all, let alone with people aboard.
There are caveats, though. Blue Origin’s capsule is only intended to take passengers just beyond the boundary of space, 328,000 feet, where they’ll look out on the Earth through the largest windows ever fitted to a spacecraft. The Dragon capsule, on the other hand, is intended to go into orbit, accommodating a variety of missions including those to the ISS.
Despite the differences, being the first to launch paying customers and safely return them to Earth would be a major coup for either company. It’s their future plans, however, that hold the most intrigue for space enthusiasts who dream of exploring new worlds.
Ultimately, SpaceX and Blue Origin are working toward the same thing—low-cost, reusable space transport. Blue Origin sees New Shepard as a steppingstone to its orbital launcher, New Glenn, which will be even larger than SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy. Musk, on the other hand, sees his launchers as steppingstones to Mars, which can also be adapted for suborbital flights as high-speed point-to-point transports. (Say, New York to London in 22 minutes.) As for what SpaceX’s experiences will be like, we’ll have to wait and see. Whether Bezos beats Musk in putting men into orbit in 2018 or not, however, it looks like Blue Origin has a winner on its hands.