New photos reveal Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin is going to be pretty swanky
Blue Origin's New Shepard capsule looks like a cushy ride for any space tourist flying high above the planet.
New illustrations show the comfortable looking seats and interior of the Jeff Bezos-backed spaceship.
"Every seat's a window seat," Bezos said in an email sent out Wednesday, revealing the new artist's illustrations. New Shepard actually boasts the largest windows of any craft to fly to space, Bezos added.
While Blue Origin hasn't yet flown people aboard their space system, the company is working toward that goal by launching multiple tests of the New Shepard rocket and capsule.
The first Blue Origin New Shepard rocket flew its fifth and most recent flight to suborbital space in October 2016.
Blue Origin is aiming for reusability in both its rockets and capsules by bringing both back to Earth and reusing them after each flight, reducing the cost of launching to space.
The company, which was founded by Bezos in 2000, could start flying people on test missions by the end of this year.
One day, Blue Origin hopes to fly paying customers up to about 62 miles (100 kilometers) in altitude, bringing them to suborbital space before coming back down to Earth under a set of parachutes.
It's not yet clear how much these trips will cost, but if it's anything like the pricing laid out for other suborbital space trips, it won't be cheap. Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic is selling seats aboard its SpaceShipTwo for about $250,000, though that company hasn't yet started flying customers yet either.
Suborbital space is just the start for Bezos.
Blue Origin has plans to manufacture and fly multiple rockets, including a heavy-lift launcher that could bring people and payloads to the distant reaches of the solar system one day.
Bezos' vision for Blue Origin is clear.
"We want to see millions of people living and working in space," Bezos said in 2015, and many times since then. "It’s a worthwhile goal."
Topics Amazon
Miriam Kramer worked as a staff writer for Space.com for about 2.5 years before joining Mashable to cover all things outer space. She took a ride in weightlessness on a zero-gravity flight and watched rockets launch to space from places around the United States. Miriam received her Master's degree in science, health and environmental reporting from New York University in 2012, and she originally hails from Knoxville, Tennessee. Follow Miriam on Twitter at @mirikramer.
