jeff bezos space tourism

NEW SHEPARD MISSION NS-25

New glenn goes vertical, fly to space on new shepard, nasa selects blue origin, reusable rocket engines.

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Jeff Bezos hails ‘best day ever’ after successful Blue Origin space flight

• Suborbital flight on New Shepard rocket lasted 11 minutes
• Bezos blasted for traveling to space as Amazon workers toil

The Amazon founder Jeff Bezos hailed “the best day ever” after completing his pioneering foray into space on Tuesday with three crewmates, among them his brother Mark.

The billionaire’s New Shepard rocket and capsule touched down in the Texas desert after a suborbital flight that lasted a mere 11 minutes, but set several records for his Blue Origin space company, including the oldest and youngest humans to fly into space.

Wally Funk, an 82-year-old female aviation pioneer who trained as an astronaut in the 1960s, flew as Bezos’s guest, while Oliver Daemen, 18, a student from the Netherlands and son of a private enquiry firm’s chief executive, was Blue Origin’s first paying customer.

The world’s richest man with an estimated net worth of $206bn, Bezos, 57, sprayed champagne and shouted his enjoyment after the successful landing of New Shepard’s first crewed mission following 15 uncrewed test flights.

“It was the best day ever,” Bezos said after emerging from the capsule, adding that he felt “unbelievably good” and that his colleagues were “a very happy crew”.

The tycoon, however, has also attracted criticism for putting his fortune into space tourism amid concerns over working conditions at Amazon, and “aggressive” tax avoidance .

In recent years, Bezos, who stood down as Amazon chief executive this month to concentrate on the space company he founded in 2000, has sold about $1bn in Amazon stock annually to fund Blue Origin.

In a post-flight press conference on Tuesday, Bezos said the venture had reinforced his commitment to tackling the climate crisis, and using New Shepard as a stepping stone towards colonising space for the benefit of Earth.

“The whole point of doing this is to practice,” said Bezos, who announced in February that he was donating $10bn to efforts to “ preserve and protect the natural world ”.

“Every time we fly this tourism mission we’re practicing flying the second stage of New Glenn,” he added, referring to Blue Origin’s planned reusable heavy-lift launch vehicle , which is central to his vision of ultimately moving industry off the planet.

“We’re going to build a road to space so our kids, and their kids, can build the future. This is not about escaping Earth … this is the only good planet in the solar system and we have to take care of it. When you go to space and see how fragile it is you want to take care of it even more.”

Bezos, who donated the proceeds from the New Shepard seat auction to Blue Origin’s Club for the Future to encourage young people to pursue careers in space and science, also announced two $100m “ Courage and Civility” awards for recipients to donate to charities of their choice.

Asked if he would fly into space again, Bezos was unequivocal.

“Hell yes,” he said. “How fast can you refuel that thing? Let’s go.”

The firm intends to run regular space tourism flights for commercial passengers.

New Shepard, named as a tribute to Alan Shepard, the first American in Space in 1961, blasted off into a clear blue sky from the launchpad in Van Horn, Texas, at 8.12am local time, the first of three scheduled flights this year, on the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.

The crew capsule successfully separated from its rocket booster shortly before reaching the 62-mile altitude Kármán Line , the internationally accepted boundary of space, after about three minutes of flight.

The crew experienced about three to four minutes of weightlessness during which the spacecraft reached the top of its flight path at 66.5 miles, more than 10 miles higher than the British billionaire Sir Richard Branson’s flight to the edge of space aboard Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity nine days earlier.

Audio from the capsule on Blue Origin’s live webcast of the flight captured the crew members shouting in excitement as they floated around the spacecraft. Video was later released.

After re-entering Earth’s atmosphere, the capsule glided to a gentle landing on parachutes, minutes after the reusable booster made a powered landing on a nearby pad.

Mark Bezos assumed the moniker “Astronaut Demo”, for the flight to distinguish him from his brother, Astronaut Bezos. Their sister Christina, director of the family foundation, sent her siblings a message before the flight, reminding them how they would pretend to be Star Trek characters as children.

“As you buckle in, I’m reminded of when Jeff was Captain Kirk, Mark, you were Sulu, and I took the role of Uhura, we would battle Klingons while firing torpedoes, all the while dodging in and out of traffic and praying that we make it to our destination safely,” she said.

“Mark, be prepared to fire those torpedoes in order to do so. Now, get your asses back down here so I can give you a big hug. We love you, and Godspeed New Shepard.”

Blue Origin has opened sales for space tourism flights but has not set a price or revealed how much Daemen paid. The winning bid in a June auction for the first seat was $28m (£20m), the winner pulling out of Tuesday’s flight because of a “scheduling conflict”.

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• Boeing & Aerospace

Ready to rocket, Jeff Bezos aims to open up space tourism

When Kent-based Blue Origin on Tuesday rockets Jeff Bezos upward on its first mission carrying humans into space, the wealthiest man on the planet will be blazing the trail of a newly hot recreation for the very rich: space tourism.

Bezos, creator of Amazon, founder and bankroller of Blue Origin, follows on the tail of the heavily marketed trip to space just days earlier by fellow billionaire Richard Branson in a Virgin Galactic spaceplane .

On Blue Origin’s rockets, tickets for its 11-minute thrill ride are initially expected to cost in excess of $300,000 per seat.

If an ephemeral experience with just three minutes of weightlessness seems a frivolous pursuit for people with money to burn, that’s not how Bezos sees it.

For him, space tourism is a way to advance and fund the technologies needed for his long-term ambitions: to make possible, in some far-off future, a sustainable space ecosystem where millions of people will live and work.

To achieve that far-reaching goal, he’s built at Blue Origin a company culture reflective of the Silicon Valley venture capital values that created Amazon and the other tech giants: an unshakable belief that technology linked with the capitalist profit motive will change the world.

Blue Origin engineer Gary Lai, one of the company’s first 20 employees and lead designer of the 60-foot-tall New Shepard reusable rocket that will boost Bezos into space, outlined in an interview the company’s rationale for space tourism.

“Even if the ticket prices are high, there are still a lot of high-net-worth individuals in the world … So there is a very healthy potential to fly very often,” he said. In turn, “Flying more and more will allow us to perfect those techniques, which will benefit all programs at Blue Origin.”

Bezos, on a 2016 press tour of Blue Origin’s Kent headquarters , likewise compared space tourism to the early aviators who flew biplanes around the U.S.

“The barnstormers who went around and landed in small towns and gave people rides up in the air, that was entertainment — but it really advanced aviation,” he said.

“You don’t get great at anything you do only 12 times a year,” Bezos said then, referring to the low frequency of NASA’s big space launches. “With the tourism mission, we can fly hundreds of times a year. That will be so much practice.”

For him and for Blue Origin, the New Shepard rocket — named after the first American to go to space, Alan Shepard — is the precursor to bolder steps later: putting rockets into orbit around the Earth, sending them to the moon and beyond.

Bezos sees space tourism on New Shepard as a steppingstone to that future.

“It’s not frivolous. It’s logical,” Bezos said in 2016. “It’s actually a critically important mission for taking this thing to the next level.”

Generating cash

After decades of waning public interest, excitement about space has been reignited over the past few years by the awesome technological innovation , as well as the marketing savvy, of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Branson’s Virgin Galactic and Bezos’s Blue Origin.

As a result, venture capital money is pouring into space startups, with almost $38 billion going to space infrastructure companies in the past decade, according to the latest data from Space Capital, a firm that promotes investment in the industry.

Bezos, who sold $6.6 billion of Amazon stock in May, has said he is spending $1 billion a year on Blue Origin.

But will the new public interest be maintained? The sheer boldness and engineering magic of the 1969 moon landing captured people’s imagination, but then faded as the years passed with little to show for it but dust and rocks.

In line with Blue Origin’s Silicon Valley-style perspective, Lai believes the privatizing of space and the profit motive will make it different this time. Human interest in space exploration is “almost primal,” he said.

He said NASA’s Apollo and Space Shuttle programs faded because they “required so much government support, and the political will to sustain them started to wane. They became very bureaucratic and started to lack vision.”

“What companies like Blue Origin and SpaceX and others are bringing is to make this a commercially sustainable enterprise so it will not require government funding and the biannual cycles of Congress to fund,” Lai said. “If we can make this a commercially sustainable enterprise, it will grow on its own.”

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For that, space tourism will have to be profitable, he asserts.

“We will not get millions of people living and working in space, if it is not profitable.”

‘It will make money’

In Virgin Galactic’s quite different approach to lifting tourists into space, a crewed rocket-powered “spaceplane” is released from underneath a “mothership” at an altitude of 50,000 feet, then fires its engines and launches into space. It’s guided back to land by two pilots.

Branson projects building several global spaceports, enabling 400 flights to space a year on multiple models of the spaceplane.

On the Blue Origin rocket, in contrast, there’s no crew controlling the vehicle at any point, only passengers.

The booster rocket soars upward burning a mix of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. Its exhaust is a trail of water vapor with no carbon emissions.

Near the top of New Shepard’s arc the six-seat passenger capsule detaches. It descends on parachutes while the reusable booster rocket is guided down to land vertically, its descent softened by reigniting the engine as it approaches the ground.

Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket launch starts at 6:30 a.m. Central Daylight Time on Tuesday, July 20, in the West Texas desert. (That’s 4:30 a.m. Pacific Time.) Liftoff is slated for 8 a.m. CDT (6 a.m. PT) but could change.

Three people will join Bezos on Tuesday’s flight, two of them by his personal invitation: his brother, Mark Bezos ; and 82-year-old Wally Funk , one of the original female NASA astronauts trained for the Mercury missions who never got to go to space.

The fourth passenger is 18-year-old Oliver Daemen , son of the CEO of a private equity investment firm whose bid in Blue Origin’s charity auction had initially secured a seat on the second flight. Daemen was moved up after the auction winner, who had bid $28 million, chose to postpone to a later flight.

Rocketing into space is clearly a passionate dream for Bezos.

He often relates being captivated as a 5-year-old watching on TV as Neil Armstrong first stepped onto the moon. Bezos chose Tuesday for the flight because it’s the anniversary of that day 52 years ago.

On that 2016 press tour, he cited two reasons why humans need to go to space. The first, couched as an altruistic ideal, was to create an industrial ecosystem in space to preserve the finite resources here on earth.

The second might have come from his 5-year-old heart: “It’s a glorious adventure,” Bezos said.

Now it must also be a business, said Ariane Cornell, Blue Origin’s astronaut sales director, responsible for selling tickets to individuals who want to ride on New Shepard.

“Our founder has one of the most brilliant business minds around. So, this is a business. I can say that for sure,” Cornell said. “Absolutely. It will make money.”

She said more than 7,600 people registered for the company’s auction to buy a seat on the first flight. Since then, “I have been very busy on the phone talking to very serious customers from around the world.”

“While it’s a nascent market, I can tell you there’s a lot of pent-up demand to go to space,” she added.

After Tuesday’s flight Blue Origin has two more launches with passengers lined up for this year, “and many more to come,” Cornell said.

“People are clearly interested in paying more to be first certainly,” she said. “As more people go, we do see the price coming down.”

And she said the total package offered by Blue Origin is not so ephemeral. Ticket buyers will go to the Texas launch site to train for two days ahead of the rocket launch.

“All of that is part of the experience, not just the 11 minutes off the ground,” Cornell said.

Virgin Galactic, led by CEO Michael Colglazier who was previously president of Disneyland, similarly intends to market an overarching experience around the actual ride.

Cornell pitches the climactic ride to space as life-changing.

“You’re on top of a rocket. You’re going to get the rumble of the engine as you take off, you’re going to feel the G’s come on and you’re going to get that evolution of the colors outside those huge windows,” she said.

When the passengers unbuckle at the top of their capsule’s arc for 3 to 4 minutes of weightless floating and somersaults, they’ll have a striking view of the curvature of the earth, the blackness of space and the colors of the ocean-dominated planet that gave Blue Origin its name.

As for the brevity of that view, Cornell compared it to climbers summiting Everest, then very soon turning around to go back down.

“Still people do it,” she said. “I think people are going to want to do this for years and years and years to come.”

The space tourist market

Doug Harned, a financial analyst with Bernstein Research who covers the space industry, believes the space tourism business can make money near term.

“You can generate a lot of cash with these expensive tickets,” he said. “The operating costs are just dwarfed by what you can bring in revenues.”

Yet he worries the revenue might not be sustained for many years.

He said the two-and-a-half-hour webcast that surrounded Branson’s Virgin Galactic ride last Sunday, hosted by Stephen Colbert, fell flat and prompted scathing Twitter reviews.

“There was so much discussion about what an epic event this is,” said Harned. “Well, you go up there, you’re weightless for three minutes, pretty cool, and then come back down. People look at it and say, ‘Really, is it that exciting?'”

Taber MacCallum, CEO of Space Perspective , has a very different space tourism experience in mind. His Tucson, Ariz.-based company is touting “the world’s most radically gentle voyage to space” in a high-performance space balloon.

It will climb serenely over two hours to an altitude of just 100,000 feet, or 19 miles up, which is less than a third as high as New Shepard. But a successful unmanned test flight from Florida last month showed that’s high enough to view the curvature of the earth and the blackness of space.

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Though it won’t provide the experience of weightlessness, Space Perspective’s enclosed passenger cabin — with a fallback safety parachute in case the balloon fails — will float in the stratosphere for two hours before it starts to descend.

MacCallum is targeting taking passengers up in 2024, though with just one test flight completed he concedes that’s “an aggressive schedule.”

“We will fly when it’s safe,” he said.

Risk and reward

In the meantime, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic are ready to fly space tourists.

And Bezos has bigger plans in the works.

The New Shepard rocket shoots its passengers up high and then goes straight down again, called a suborbital launch.

That’s far short of how the more powerful Falcon 9 rockets built by Elon Musk’s SpaceX boost satellites and humans into a steady orbit around the Earth. SpaceX is expected to take a civilian crew raising money for charity into orbit later this year.

Bezos’ team is working on orbital capability. Blue Origin is developing the much larger, two-stage New Glenn rocket — named after John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth.

Now targeted to fly toward the end of 2022, New Glenn will take payloads and humans into orbit and eventually could go to the moon and beyond.

New Glenn’s first stage will land using the system developed for New Shepard. Its second stage will have engines derived from those of the smaller rocket. Its control software includes many of the same algorithms.

“New Shepard is a critical keystone part of all the programs that we’re doing at Blue,” said Cornell.

Blue Origin’s Latin motto — ‘Gradatim Ferociter’ or “step by step ferociously” — has brought steady success with no serious New Shepard failures. Still, there are dangers with space technology.

Virgin Galactic’s first spaceplane broke up in flight in 2014, when the crew prematurely unlocked the aircraft’s movable tail section. One pilot died and the second was badly injured.

In an April report assessing the financial risk for investors in Virgin Galactic, Harned wrote that a single catastrophic failure with paying passengers aboard, whether by Virgin, Blue Origin or SpaceX, “could have a crushing effect on demand for all.”

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), in granting a launch license to Blue Origin, required it to take out $150 million in liability insurance for its flights. Any personal coverage beyond that is up to the astronauts.

To assess the risk for Bezos on Tuesday, no one is better placed than Gary Lai, who knows every safety system on the New Shepard rocket.

“From the napkin sketch phase through the final design and through most of the certification flights, I led that team,” Lai said.

Through 15 previous New Shepard launches, Lai’s team found problems and fixed them.

Blue Origin designed and flight tested an escape system that propels the passenger capsule to safety away from the main rocket if anything goes wrong on the launchpad or during the ascent.

Conducting hundreds of test flights, as Boeing would do for a new airplane design before putting passengers aboard, would be prohibitively expensive. Yet Lai is confident of success.

At this point, Lai said he has no sense of fear, only excitement.

“I feel we’ve done everything that we can to make this safe,” he said. “The only thing really to make it safer is simply not to fly and just stay on the ground.”

“But that is not what New Shepard was made for, to sit on the ground,” said Lai. “You need to fly.”

The opinions expressed in reader comments are those of the author only and do not reflect the opinions of The Seattle Times.

Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin targeting Aug. 4 for next space tourist flight

The NS-22 mission is scheduled to launch Thursday (Aug. 4) at 9:30 a.m. EDT (1330 GMT).

Blue Origin will launch its sixth human spaceflight next week, if all goes according to plan.

Jeff Bezos' company is targeting Thursday (Aug. 4) for the next space-tourism mission of its New Shepard vehicle, which will send six people to suborbital space and back.

The mission — known as NS-22, because it will be the 22nd New Shepard flight, crewed or uncrewed — is scheduled to launch Thursday from Blue Origin's West Texas site at 9:30 a.m. EDT (1330 GMT; 8:30 a.m. local time). You can watch it here at Space.com, courtesy of Blue Origin , or directly via the company . Coverage will begin 30 minutes before liftoff.

In photos : Blue Origin's 1st New Shepard passenger launch with Jeff Bezos

NS-22 will notch several spaceflight firsts. For example, crewmembers Mário Ferreira and Sara Sabry will become the first people from Portugal and Egypt, respectively, to reach space, according to a Blue Origin mission description . 

In addition, NS-22 will make crewmember Vanessa O'Brien the first person ever to climb the world's tallest mountain (Mt. Everest), reach the deepest point in the ocean (the Pacific's Challenger Deep) and cross the boundary into outer space.

The other three passengers on NS-22 are Coby Cotton, who co-founded the popular YouTube channel Dude Perfect; technology pioneer Clint Kelly III; and telecommunications executive (not former NFL quarterback) Steve Young. You can read more about all six in our NS-22 crewmembers story .

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Cotton and Sabry apparently aren't paying their own way; their seats were sponsored by MoonDAO and Space for Humanity, respectively, organizations that aim to increase access to space.

— Jeff Bezos: Blue Origin and Amazon founder — In photos: William Shatner launches to space on Blue Origin's New Shepard — Blue Origin launches Michael Strahan and crew of 5 on record-setting suborbital spaceflight

It's unclear how much it costs to fly on New Shepard, by the way; Blue Origin has not divulged its ticket prices. For comparison, suborbital tourism competitor Virgin Galactic charges $450,000 for a seat aboard its VSS Unity space plane, which has not yet begun full commercial operations.

New Shepard is a reusable rocket-capsule combo that gives passengers a view of Earth against the blackness of space and lets them experience a few minutes of weightlessness . Each New Shepard mission lasts about 11 minutes from liftoff to capsule touchdown. (The rocket comes down for a powered vertical landing shortly before the capsule lands.)

Mike Wall is the author of " Out There " (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall . Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or on Facebook .  

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: [email protected].

Michael Wall is a Senior Space Writer with  Space.com  and joined the team in 2010. He primarily covers exoplanets, spaceflight and military space, but has been known to dabble in the space art beat. His book about the search for alien life, "Out There," was published on Nov. 13, 2018. Before becoming a science writer, Michael worked as a herpetologist and wildlife biologist. He has a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from the University of Sydney, Australia, a bachelor's degree from the University of Arizona, and a graduate certificate in science writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz. To find out what his latest project is, you can follow Michael on Twitter.

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How bad is space tourism for the environment? And other space travel questions, answered.

Six questions to consider before launching yourself into space.

by Rebecca Heilweil

For many, the rise of commercial space tourism is a vulgar display of wealth and power . Amid several global crises, including climate change and a pandemic, billionaires are spending their cash on launching themselves into space for fun. When Amazon founder Jeff Bezos told reporters after his first space tourism trip on Tuesday that Amazon customers and employees had “paid” for his flight, that only intensified that criticism.

But critics won’t deter Bezos and the other superrich. Space tourism is now a reality for the people who can afford it — and it will have repercussions for everyone on Earth.

In fact,all signs indicate that the market for these trips is already big enough that they’ll keep happening. Jeff Bezos’s spaceflight company Blue Origin already has two more trips scheduled later this year , while Virgin Galactic , the space firm founded by billionaire Richard Branson, has at least 600 people who have already paid around $250,000 each for future tickets on its spaceplane.

Now, as the commercial space tourism market (literally) gets off the ground, there are big questions facing future space travelers — and everyone else on the planet. Here are answers to the six biggest ones.

1. What will people actually be able to see and experience on a space trip?

The biggest perk of traveling to space is the view. Just past the boundary between space and Earth, passengers can catch a stunning glimpse of our planet juxtaposed against the wide unknown of space. If a passenger is riding on a Virgin Galactic flight, they will get about 53 miles above sea level. Blue Origin riders will get a little bit higher, about 62 miles above sea level and past the Kármán line, the internationally recognized boundary between Earth and space. Overall, the experience on both flights is pretty similar.

The view is meant to be awe-inducing, and the experience even has its own name: the Overview Effect . “​​When you see Earth from that high up, it changes your perspective on things and how interconnected we are and how we squander that here on Earth,” Wendy Whitman Cobb, a professor at the US Air Force’s School of Advanced Air and Space Studies, told Recode.

Another perk of these trips is that space tourists will feel a few minutes of microgravity, which is when gravity feels extremely weak . That will give them the chance to bounce around a spacecraft weightlessly before heading back to Earth.

But Blue Origin’s and Virgin Galactic’s flights are relatively brief — about 10 and 90 minutes long , respectively. Other space tourism flights from SpaceX, the space company founded by Elon Musk , will have more to offer. This fall, billionaire Jared Isaacman, who founded the company Shift4 Payments, will pilot SpaceX’s first all-civilian flight, the Inspiration4 , which will spend several days in orbit around Earth. In the coming years, the company has also planned private missions to the International Space Station, as well as a trip around the moon .

These trips are meant to be enjoyed by space nerds who longed to be astronauts. But there’s another reason rich people want to go to space: demonstrating exclusivity and conspicuous consumption. More than a few people can afford a trip to Venice or the Maldives. But how many people are privileged enough to take a trip to space?

“What a nice way of showing off these days than to post a picture on Instagram from space,” Sridhar Tayur, a Carnegie Mellon business professor, told Recode.

2. Does commercial space travel have any scientific goals, or is it really just a joyride?

Right now, space tourism flights from Virgin Galactic and Blue Originhave only reached suborbital space , which means that flights enter space but do not enter orbit around Earth. Scientifically, that’s not a new frontier. Though these current flights use new technology, suborbital flight with humans aboard was accomplished by NASA back in the early 1960s , Matthew Hersch, a historian of technology at Harvard, told Recode.

Right now, it’s not clear these trips will offer scientists major new insights, but they might provide information that could be used in the future for space exploration. In fact, these trips are also being marketed as potential opportunities for scientific experiments. For instance, the most recent Virgin Galactic flight carried plants and tested how they responded to microgravity .

These private companies primarily see opportunities in their commercial vehicles that can be reused at scale, which will allow the same rockets (or in Virgin Galactic’s case, spaceplanes) to go to space again and again, which lowers the overall cost of space tourism.

Billionaires and their private space companies also see the development of these rockets as an opportunity to prepare for flights that will do even more, and go even farther, into space. Bezos, for instance, has argued that New Shepard’s suborbital flights will help prepare the company’s future missions, including its New Glenn rocket, which is meant for orbital space.

“The fact of the matter is, the architecture and the technology we have chosen is complete overkill for a suborbital tourism mission,” Bezos said at Tuesday’s post-launch briefing . “We have chosen the vertical landing architecture. Why did we do that? Because it scales.”

Beyond potential scientific advancements in the future, suborbital spaceflight might also create new ways to travel from one place on earth to another. SpaceX, for instance, has advertised that long-haul flights could be shortened to just 30 minutes by traveling through space.

3. Is it safe?

Right now, it’s not entirely clear just how risky space tourism is.

One way space tourism companies are trying to keep travelers safe is by requiring training so that the people who are taking a brief sojourn off Earth are as prepared as possible.

On the flight, people can experience intense altitude and G-forces. “This is sustained G-forces on your body, upwards of what can be 6 G in one direction — which is six times your body weight for upwards of 20 or 30 seconds,” Glenn King, the chief operating officer of the Nastar Center — the aerospace physiology training center that prepared Richard Branson for his flights — told Recode. “That’s a long time when you have six people, or your weight, pressing down on you.”

There’s also the chance that space tourists will be exposed to radiation, though that risk depends on how long you’re in space. “It’s a risk, especially more for the orbital flight than sub-orbital,” explains Whitman Cobb. “Going up in an airplane exposes you to a higher amount of radiation than you would get here on the ground.” She also warns that some tourists will likely barf on the ride.

There doesn’t seem to be an age limit on who can travel, though. The most recent Blue Origin flight included both the youngest person to ever travel to space, an 18-year-old Dutch teenager, as well as the oldest:82-year-old pilot Wally Funk.

4. How much will tickets cost?

The leaders in commercial space tourism already claim they have a market to support the industry. While Bezos hinted on Tuesday the price would eventually come down — as eventually happened with the high prices of the nascent airline industry — for now, ticket prices are in the low hundreds of thousands, at least for Virgin Galactic . That price point would keep spaceflight out of reach for most of humanity, but there are enough interested rich people that space tourism seems to be economically feasible.

“If you bring it down to $250,000, the wait times [to buy a ticket] will be very long,” Tayur, of Carnegie Mellon, told Recode.

5. What impact will commercial space travel have on the environment?

The emissions of a flight to space can be worse than those of a typical airplane flight because just a few people hop aboard one of these flights, so the emissions per passenger are much higher. That pollution could become much worse if space tourism becomes more popular. Virgin Galactic alone eventually aims to launch 400 of these flights annually.

“The carbon footprint of launching yourself into space in one of these rockets is incredibly high, close to about 100 times higher than if you took a long-haul flight,” Eloise Marais , a physical geography professor at the University College London, told Recode. “It’s incredibly problematic if we want to be environmentally conscious and consider our carbon footprint.”

These flights’ effects on the environment will differdepending on factors like the fuel they use, the energy required to manufacture that fuel,andwhere they’re headed — and all these factors make it difficult to model their environmental impact. For instance, Jeff Bezos has argued that the liquid hydrogen and oxygen fuel Blue Origin uses is less damaging to the environment than the other space competitors (technically, his flight didn’t release carbon dioxide ), but experts told Recode it could still have significant environmental effects .

There are also other risks we need to keep studying , including the release of soot that could hurt the stratosphere and the ozone. A study from 2010 found that the soot released by 1,000 space tourism flights could warm Antarctica by nearly 1 degree Celsius. “There are some risks that are unknown,” Paul Peeters, a tourism sustainability professor at the Breda University of Applied Sciences, told Recode. “We should do much more work to assess those risks and make sure that they do not occur or to alleviate them somehow — before you start this space tourism business.”Overall, he thinks the environmental costs are reason enough not to take such a trip.

6. Who is regulating commercial space travel?

Right now, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has generally been given the job of overseeing the commercial space industry. But regulation of space is still relatively meager.

One of the biggest areas of concern is licensing launches and making sure that space flights don’t end up hitting all the other flying vehicles humans launch into the sky, like planes and drones. Just this June, a SpaceX flight was held up after a helicopter flew into the zone of the launch.

There’s a lot that still needs to be worked out, especially as there are more of these launches. On Thursday, the Senate hosted a hearing with leaders of the commercial space industry focused on overseeing the growing amount of civil space traffic .

At the same time, the FAA is also overseeing a surging number of spaceports — essentially airports for spaceflight — and making sure there’s enough space for them to safely set up their launches.

But there are other areas where the government could step in. “I think the cybersecurity aspect will also play a very vital role, so that people don’t get hacked,” Tayur said. The FAA told Recode that the agency has participated in developing national principles for space cybersecurity, but Congress hasn’t given it a specific role in looking at the cybersecurity of space.

At some point, the government might also step in to regulate the environmental impact of these flights, too, but that’s not something the FAA currently has jurisdiction over.

In the meantime, no government agency is currently vetting these companies when it comes to the safety of the human passengers aboard. An FAA official confirmed with Recode that while the agency is awarding licenses to companies to carry humans to space , they’re not actually confirming that these trips are safe. That’s jurisdiction Congress won’t give the agency until 2023.

There doesn’t seem to be an abundance of travelers’ insurance policies for space. “Passengers basically sign that they’re waiving all their rights,” Whitman Cobb said. “You’re acknowledging that risk and doing it yourself right now.”

So fair warning, if you decide to shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars for a joyride to space: You’d likely have to accept all responsibility ifyou get hurt.

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When Can I Buy a Ticket to Space? A Guide for Non-Billionaires.

We’re at the dawn of a new era for space exploration, with thrill-seeking civilians boldly going where no tourist has gone before. Over 60 years after Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space, a handful of companies are planning to take non-astronauts with sufficiently massive bank accounts on a galactic tour: Tesla Founder Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin , and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic.

Here’s everything you need to know about the rise of space tourism, from which billionaires are leaving Earth imminently to when the rest of us might be able to join them.

What’s the history of civilian space travel?

The initial effort to send a civilian into space ended in disaster: In 1986, Christa McAuliffe was set to be the first civilian and teacher in space, but she and six crewmates were tragically killed during the explosion of Space Shuttle Challenger.

After that, NASA largely forbade the practice. But Russia’s then-struggling space program stepped up to the plate. On April 28, 2001, Dennis Tito paid a whopping $20 million for a seat on a Russian Soyuz rocket, becoming the first civilian to visit the International Space Station – humanity’s home away from home. According to Space.com , just seven space tourists have followed in his footsteps in the last 20 years, via Russia’s Space Agency. But the year ahead should be a busy one for the nascent industry, with more and more civilians reaching for the stars.

Who’s heading to space next?

The competition between the major players in the billionaire space race heated up when Bezos announced that he would jet off to the brink of space and back on July 20, the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. On July 1 – just hours after Bezos announced that in addition to his brother, he’d be joined on the flight by aviation pioneer Wally Funk – Richard Branson revealed that he would beat the Amazon founder into space by nine days. Branson will blast off on Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity rocketplane on July 11.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX is planning what it’s billing as “the world’s first all-civilian space flight” in late 2021. The multiday flight into low Earth orbit, dubbed “Inspiration4” and funded by billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, aims to raise awareness for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and begin “a new era for human spaceflight and exploration.” The crew includes Isaacman, childhood cancer survivor Hayley Arceneaux, plus two others. It’s currently scheduled to launch “no earlier than September 15, 2021,” per the mission’s website.

SpaceX aims to keep the momentum going by partnering with Houston-based Axiom Space to send more everyday people into space using its Crew Dragon spacecraft, this time going to the International Space Station. Axiom’s first private ISS mission is set to launch “no earlier than January 2022.” Its second mission is the focus of the Discovery Channel reality-TV show Who Wants to Be an Astronaut? , in which contestants take on extreme challenges for a chance at a ticket to the ISS. Axiom Space plans to eventually host civilian space station jaunts every six months.

What does this cost?

Unsurprisingly, going to space comes with a hefty price tag. Axiom passengers will pay the low, low price of $55 million for the flight and a stay on the ISS. Meanwhile, Virgin Galactic’s suborbital trips — where passengers can experience weightlessness for several minutes before falling back to Earth — are far more reasonable in cost, at $250,000 . Six hundred people have already made reservations for 90-minute flights on Branson’s SpaceShipTwo, Reuters reports. And while Bezos’s Blue Origin hasn’t announced official prices, an auction for a seat to join him and his brother on his brief sojourn to space in July went for a cool $28 million .

How safe is it?

Hollywood isn’t exaggerating: Going to space is inherently dangerous. Congress agreed in 2004 to largely let the space-tourism industry self-regulate, so there are few laws and restrictions on taking civilians into space.

“One way that the government could have gone was to say, ‘Hey, we’re going to certify the spacecraft, make sure that they’re safe and give them the stamp of approval,’” Mark Sundahl, an expert at space law at Cleveland State University, told Discover magazine . “But they didn’t go that way. Instead, they said ‘We’re going to prove we’re protecting space tourists by just requiring the companies to tell them that they may die, and then it’s up to them to make a decision if they want to take that risk or not.’ That’s the approach that the government took, and it is somewhat controversial.”

What other types of space tourism are in the works?

Strapping in on a rocket and blasting off into space isn’t the only type of travel available for those eager to leave this planet. Human space flight company Space Perspective is planning to fly passengers to the edge of space in a high-tech version of a hot-air balloon, “the size of a football stadium,” lifted by hydrogen. Flights are planned for early 2024, with tickets priced firmly at $125,000 per person.

For another out-of-this-world vacation, check out the company Orbital Assembly Corporation , which plans to open a luxury space hotel in 2027. The hotel, named Voyager Station, looks almost like a Ferris wheel floating in orbit and features a restaurant, gym, and Earth-viewing lounges and bars. A three-and-a-half-day stay is expected to cost up to $5 million, the Washington Post reports.

Are other celebrities planning to explore space?

A slew of stars have already bought their tickets to space with Virgin Galactic, among them Justin Bieber, Ashton Kusher, and Leonardo DiCaprio, according to the New York Daily News . Last year, Actor Tom Cruise and NASA announced their own collaboration to make a movie on the International Space Station.

When can the average person do this?

Once again, the biggest barrier to space is the price tag. But air travel was also once prohibitively expensive, with a one-way ticket across the country costing more than half the price of a new car ; one can expect similar price reductions in space travel. For now, partaking in a sweepstakes or reality show might be the best bet for those with tiny bank accounts and big dreams of taking to the stars.

This post was updated after Branson announced he would head to space on July 11.

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• richard branson
• blue origin
• virgin galactic

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Everything you need to know about space tourism

Posted: May 9, 2024 | Last updated: May 9, 2024

Between floating in weightlessness, witnessing 16 sunrises a day and gazing into the infinite void, space travel sure sounds like an out-of-this-world experience. And now, it’s no longer a thing of the future.

That’s right, soon interstellar awe will be open to (almost) anyone, as billionaires Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk are pushing the space tourism industry to a higher orbit.

What is space tourism?

Well, it’s almost like regular tourism: travel for recreational and leisure purposes… but in outer space. Some organizations like the Commercial Spaceflight Federation and the Citizens in Space project prefer to use the terms “personal spaceflight” or “citizen space exploration,” though.

In a nutshell, it’s space travel for non-astronauts.

Who can travel to space?

Anyone ! Well, that is, anyone with enough money. No need to have any previous science qualifications or NASA training, especially since a trained crew will escort tourists on their galactic journey.

According to Virgin Galactic, future space tourists will be between 10 and 90 years old, and come from diverse professional and cultural backgrounds.

The only thing you need? The desire to explore the universe!

What is orbital travel?

The main difference between orbital and suborbital flights lies in the trajectory and speed of the vessels.

To go into orbit, a rocket or spaceship needs to follow a path that goes around the Earth at the very fast minimum speed of 7.7 kilometres (4.8 miles) per second, in order to keep circling and never fall back down.

It allows astronauts and travellers to stay in space for extended periods of time, hence it is for now the preferred type of flight.

What is suborbital travel?

A suborbital flight , which is what Branson and Bezos did, “just” requires enough energy to blast off to space and then naturally fall back to Earth, making a huge arc.

It requires less energy and is less costly than orbital flights, thus opening doors for relatively affordable space tourism in the future.

Passengers would experience up to six minutes of weightlessness and a grandiose view.

How do you prepare?

Although Virgin Galactic doesn’t explicitly list its physical requirements, they did say astronauts would have to pass certain medical checkups and training programs. Blue Origin, on the other hand, has said that training for suborbital trips will only take a day.

And of course, any space tourist will also have to pass a series of thorough tests to determine whether they’re fit to fly up there.

Once in space, you may have to perform small bouts of exercise to prevent muscle wasting , which takes place after just seven days.

What is lunar tourism?

As its name hints, lunar tourism is the project of sending paying travellers to the moon. The first one could happen as soon as 2023, and would consist of a loop flight.

But three types of lunar tourism could be available in the near future: circumlunar trajectory, lunar orbit, and even lunar landing.

How cool would it be to say to someone, upon returning from a lunar vacation, “I’ve literally loved you to the moon and back”?

Where does space tourism take place?

Admittedly, space is a vast place. So where exactly would tourists go ?

First, any space travel begins with the Kármán line , which lies at 100 kilometres (62 miles) above sea level and is commonly accepted as the limit between Earth’s atmosphere and outer space.

Then, there are several options: orbital, suborbital, and lunar space tourism.

Have touristic space travels already occurred?

Yes! From 2001 to 2009, the Russian space agency and the U.S.-based space tourism company Space Adventures took seven (very wealthy) members of the public for several orbital space travels to the International Space Station.

The flights took place aboard the famous spacecraft Soyuz but stopped in 2010, since the crew of actual astronauts grew bigger and left no more seats available for paying space tourists.

Who were the first space tourists?

The American businessman Dennis Tito became officially the first space tourist in April 2001, when he stayed for seven days on the International Space Station.

He was followed by six multimillionaire fellows from various countries: South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth, American scientist Gregory Olsen, Iranian engineer Anousheh Ansari (the first female space tourist), Hungarian-American computer programmer Charles Simonyi, British video game mogul Richard Garriott, and Canadian businessman Guy Laliberté.

On July 11, 2021, billionaire Richard Branson, along with three Virgin Galactic employees and two pilots, reached an altitude of 85 kilometres (53 miles) above Earth aboard his Virgin Galactic rocket plane, the Unity. Less than 10 days later, on July 20, the world’s richest man, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, briefly entered space on Blue Origin , his private space company’s reusable rocket. He was joined by his younger brother Mark, Dutch teenager Oliver Daemen, and Wally Funk, who, at 82 years old, became the oldest astronaut.

Who would be the space tourism “agencies”?

Unlike past tourism experiments, which took place aboard vessels sent off for scientific purposes, future travels will happen on private companies’ flights set up solely for space tourism.

Those pioneering aerospace companies are Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic ; SpaceX, founded by Tesla co-founder Elon Musk ; and Blue Origin , created by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

When will space tourism happen?

Sooner than you think. According to Forbes , Virgin Galactic’s successful trip means the company could start sending civilians up into space as soon as early 2022. Likewise, Blue Origin, which has a Federal Aviation Administration licence for human space travel through August 2021, could officially enter the space tourism game by early 2022.

How much will it cost?

It’s not exactly clear at the moment, but there have been some indications. For example, Virgin Galactic began selling ticket reservations for US$250,000 and sold roughly 600, before a test crash in 2014 brought sales to a halt. They’re expected to start selling tickets again in 2022, but at a much higher price.

It was reported in 2018 that seats on Bezos’s Blue Origin would also cost in the ballpark of US$200,000 to US$300,000, but that could change given how high demand is. At a recent auction, the winning bid for a seat aboard the company’s first spaceflight was a whopping US$28 million .

The bottom line is, those hoping to take a trip around the stars will either need to know someone or have hundreds of thousands (likely even millions) of dollars to spare.

How do we get there?

The development of space tourism vehicles is still an ongoing project.

But a few options already exist, like Virgin Galactic’s spaceplanes that can carry up to eight people, or SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft , launched by the Falcon Heavy rocket.

Blue Origin’s New Shepard looks more like a regular rocket that takes off and lands vertically, but also claims to offer the biggest windows of any spacecraft—a good selling point. It comfortably sits six people and is fully autonomous, meaning no pilot onboard.

What does it feel like?

Needless to say, travelling to space is no walk in the park.

You’re eager to experience the joys of floating in microgravity? You better also get prepared to endure several physical discomforts: nausea and sea sickness, dizziness, headache, disorientation, puffy face, and bloodshot eyes.

But astronauts and previous space tourists agree that the body adjusts fairly quickly, getting used to its spatial environment in about three days.

Is it safe?

Safety is a reasonable concern , considering the many hazards involved in space travel: the probability of a crash, exposure to cosmic radiation, and even unknown dangers that could emerge with this new industry. But here is the real question for any adventurer: is the thrill worth the risk?

What is the food like?

For many tourists, food is a crucial criterion for a successful vacation. But outer space is no place for gourmets, at least not yet. Interstellar tourists can expect to enjoy mostly canned, modified, and pre-packaged meals (such as space burritos and freeze-dried ice cream). But soon, thanks to NASA’s veggie farm , space tourists might be able to savour space-grown salads.

What about the accommodations?

Orbital space travel allows you to stay up there for a few days or even weeks. At that point, you might want to stretch your legs outside of the spacecraft, right? Well, in the future, space stations could be used as hotels: the Genesis inflatable habitats by Bigelow Aerospace and the Space Island Project are existing examples. Make sure to book a room with a view of planet Earth!

How to pack a space suitcase?

Packing a suitcase for a trip through the cosmos is actually less of a headache than doing so for a weekend vacation on Earth. Just keep in mind that it’s impossible to do laundry in space, so pack clothes accordingly : stock up on underwear, light clothing (space station temperature is controlled at about 22 degrees Celsius, or 72 degrees Fahrenheit), and exercise outfits. Outerwear will be provided: an orange suit for takeoff and re-entry, and a white one for potential space strolls.

Is it eco-friendly?

With ecotourism being a growing trend and concern over the last few years, the question is legitimate. Well, bad news: space travel could have a negative impact by accelerating global warming . This would be caused by the black carbon released into the stratosphere after suborbital launches. But of course, entrepreneurs in the industry claim that the carbon footprint of space tourism would be minimal. The truth is, rockets emit 50 to 100 times more CO₂ per passenger than a regular flight. Considering that Virgin Galactic plans to do 400 trips per year, that’s a lot of CO₂ entering the atmosphere.

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Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk space feud reignites with Blue Origin request

The  billionaire space race  between Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Elon Musk’s SpaceX has taken a dramatic turn.

Last week, Blue Origin filed a  public comment  to the FAA requesting that the regulator limit the number of launches of SpaceX’s Starship—the largest and most powerful rocket ever built—out of Launch Complex-39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, which currently hosts the company’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets.

The FAA in May released a  SpaceX proposal  for high-frequency Starship operations at Kennedy, including the construction of infrastructure that would allow Musk’s firm to complete 44 launches per year.

The filing is the latest wrinkle in the  multiyear feud  between Musk and Bezos, who have exchanged taunts and  legal actions  as they battle for supremacy in the commercial spaceflight industry. Both SpaceX and Blue Origin have obtained contracts from U.S. government agencies such as NASA and the Pentagon and intend to make  cosmic tourism  a piece of their business.

“Sue Origin,” Musk  bantered  on social media platform X, which he acquired in 2022.

In a  subsequent post , the SpaceX boss added, “An obviously disingenuous response. Not cool of them to try (for the third time) to impede SpaceX’s progress by lawfare.”

The public comment filed by Blue Origin has no legal bearing, but the FAA  will consider it  as it determines what restrictions to place on Starship at Kennedy.

SpaceX is seeking a commercial launch vehicle operator license for Starship operations at Launch Complex 39-A, which will require the preparation of an environmental impact statement (EIS). The EIS describes the potential effects of those operations on the surrounding environment and was required for SpaceX to begin the Starship  orbital test flight program , for example. SpaceX will prepare the assessment itself under FAA supervision.

During Starship’s maiden voyage, which ended in a ball of flames a few minutes into the mission, the impact from the launch caused unexpected damage as far as 6 miles away from the Starbase launchpad in Boca Chica, Texas. The force of Starship broke windows, sent ashy debris into the sky, and brought an FAA investigation into SpaceX’s environmental mitigations, grounding the rocket for months. Five environmental groups  sued the FAA  over its handling of the mission.

Since then, SpaceX has  made several improvements  to Starbase to contain Starship’s debris field, and subsequent missions have resulted in little fanfare. However, it appears Blue Origin will use the incident as leverage in its plea to the FAA.

“At Starbase, Starship and Super Heavy test missions have been subject to environmental scrutiny due to their impact on the local environment and community,” the public comment reads, citing the aforementioned lawsuit against the regulator as evidence.

Blue Origin too launches operations out of Kennedy. The company leases Space Launch Complex-36 and occupies several hangars, as well as a manufacturing site, at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station (CCSFS), which it says are close to the area SpaceX wants to use.

“Blue Origin employs over 2,700 full-time employees in [Florida’s] Brevard County, including 449 employees at CCSFS that are directly impacted by local launch activities,” the filing reads. “Blue Origin has invested more than $1 billion in capital expenditures to develop [Launch Complex-36] as the first privately built heavy-lift launch complex in the world.”

The company said it worries about the safety of property and personnel during a Starship launch anomaly, such as an explosion, fire, debris, or loud noise. It also argued that Starship operations could impede Blue Origin’s access to shared infrastructure and “limited airspace and maritime resources.”

Starship and the Super Heavy booster hold about 5,200 metric tons of liquid methane for propulsion—the force of which, Blue Origin claims, would impede company and government activities at Kennedy due to the anticipated requirement of a safety margin around the site.

The firm urged the FAA to place a cap on the number of Starship launches, specify and limit launch times, and invest in infrastructure that would make Kennedy and CCSFS safer and more accessible for other launch providers.

It also suggested that SpaceX and the government be required to compensate Blue Origin or other companies whose commercial activities are impacted by Starship, as well as mandatory penalties for SpaceX should it violate the EIS or its license.

Given Bezos’ history with Musk, it’s difficult to say whether genuine concern, a desire to hamper the competition, or both prompted the comment.

Blue Origin is developing an alternative to Starship, New Glenn, but the rocket has  faced delays  and has yet to fly. New Glenn has collected a handful of customers, including Amazon’s Project Kuiper and NASA, which intends to launch it to Mars on its maiden voyage later this year.

NASA was at the center of the most publicized dispute between Blue Origin and SpaceX. After the space agency tapped SpaceX as the sole provider of a human landing system (HLS) for Artemis missions to the moon, Bezos in 2021 took NASA to court, arguing that it had promised two contracts

The company would  ultimately lose  that battle. But the space agency in 2023  announced  Blue Origin as the second Artemis HLS provider. Both companies are now working with NASA to develop  a revamped plan  for the Mars Sample Return Program, each receiving a $1.5 million contract.

The firms are also competing in the military sphere. In 2022, Blue Origin lost out on a  pair of Pentagon contracts  at the expense of SpaceX and United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin. But earlier this month, it secured  its own agreement  with the U.S. Space Force for 30 military launches, worth up to $5.6 billion.

This article was first published on FLYINGMAG.com

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Getting to the moon is a ‘moral obligation’ to preserve humanity, space tech executives say

Once dominated by government agencies like NASA, the space-race ecosystem is increasingly run by private companies including Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin. Now, billions of dollars are flooding into the red-hot sector, with the World Economic Forum predicting that it will be worth $1.8 trillion by 2035.

According to two space tech executives speaking at Fortune ‘s Brainstorm Tech conference in Park City, Utah, on Wednesday, the budding industry is not just an opportunity for profit. Getting back to the moon is also a “moral obligation,” said Jaret Matthews, the founder and CEO of Astrolab, a planetary logistics startup recently awarded a contract by NASA that could be worth nearly $2 billion. “To survive as a species, we need to move out among the stars,” he said.

The biggest names in the space tech sector are predictably run by two of the world’s richest men, Musk and Bezos, but a crop of startups is emerging to build out the emerging ecosystem. Rather than focusing on rockets and ships, like SpaceX and Blue Origin, Astrolab is producing rovers that can operate on interplanetary bodies, describing itself as the “UPS of the Moon.”

The idea, according to Matthews, is that as space tech develops, a cottage industry of logistics will be necessary to help support the economics of new development built on outer space surfaces. “It’s going to open up access to places like the Moon at scale to enable industrial activity,” he said.

While Astrolab may not be a direct competitor to Blue Origin and SpaceX, another startup—Stoke Space—is working on similar technology with the aim of building fully reusable rockets.

Speaking at Brainstorm Tech, Stoke’s chief operating officer Kelly Hennig admitted that she might not beat SpaceX to the goal, but that space onlookers should “vote for the little man, too.” She said that as the space landscape evolves, there will be a need for both large freight companies as well as smaller firms, comparing Stoke to the Sprinter vans used by Amazon . Stoke raised a $100 million Series B funding round in late 2023.

Getting humans back to the moon or to Mars may seem like a lofty goal, but Hennig said that any space tech development is still grounded in helping Earth’s pressing problems. She pointed to advancements supported by space tech, from GPS to weather monitoring. She added that the semiconductor and pharmaceutical industries will be able to take advantage of the low-gravity environment as more missions reach space.

“Any activity happening in space has to benefit life on Earth,” said Matthews. “Otherwise it’s not going to create value.”

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Jeff Bezos commends Trump's 'grace and courage under literal fire' after shooting at rally

• Jeff Bezos offered words of support to Donald Trump after the Saturday rally shooting.
• The Amazon founder broke a 9-month silence on X to send the message.
• Trump has previously mocked Bezos and The Washington Post, which the Amazon founder owns.

Jeff Bezos commended Donald Trump after a rally shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday, breaking a nearly nine-month hiatus on X.

"Our former President showed tremendous grace and courage under literal fire tonight. So thankful for his safety and so sad for the victims and their families," the Bezos wrote on X. The last post he shared on the site was from October 2023.

Big Tech figures were quick to condemn the Saturday shooting , which left at least two people, including the shooter, dead.

But Bezos's words of support are particularly notable considering the former president has had a long-standing public feud with the Amazon founder .

In 2019, Trump mocked Bezos, calling him "Jeff Bozo," appearing to revel in his impending divorce with MacKenzie Scott . The former president also bashed The Washington Post, which Bezos owns.

"So sorry to hear the news about Jeff Bozo being taken down by a competitor whose reporting, I understand, is far more accurate than the reporting in his lobbyist newspaper, the Amazon Washington Post," Trump wrote on January 13, 2019. "Hopefully the paper will soon be placed in better & more responsible hands!"

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Amazon recognized this public feud in a federal complaint after the company lost a $10-billion contract with the Department of Defense to Microsoft. At the time, the company alleged that Trump's "repeated public and behind-the-scenes attacks" against Amazon and Bezos were the reason why Amazon Web Services lost a valuable contract to its competitor.

The Department of Defense canceled the contract in 2021 and sought a multi-cloud deal with Amazon and Microsoft .

Andy Jassy , the CEO of Amazon since 2021 , also condemned the Saturday shooting.

"It's hard to digest what happened in Pennsylvania today. Just awful. My thoughts go out to the victims' families. Glad that President Trump is safe and hoping he recovers quickly," Jassy wrote on X.

A Trump spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

Watch: 5 ways Elon Musk shook up Twitter as CEO

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Amazon founder Jeff Bezos says Trump showed 'grace and courage' in response to assassination attempt

Bezos was joined by amazon ceo andy jassy in expressing gratitude for former president trump's safety.

Assassination attempt against Trump is going to ‘strengthen his resolve’: Rep Carlos Gimenez

Rep. Carlos Gimenez, R-Fla., says the Republican Party is ‘super motivated’ to win in November during an appearance on ‘Fox & Friends Weekend.’

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos offered praise for former President Trump after the attempted assassination of the former president on Saturday, lauding his "grace and courage."

Trump was shot in the upper part of his right ear while speaking at a political rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday. The assassination attempt was carried out by Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, who was killed by Secret Service snipers.

"Our former President showed tremendous grace and courage under literal fire tonight. So thankful for his safety and so sad for the victims and their families," Bezos wrote in a post on X.

One attendee was killed while two others were injured, and Crooks was shot dead, the FBI said.

GOFUNDME 'AUTHORIZED' BY TRUMP FOR BUTLER, PA, VICTIMS EXCEEDS $700K; VIVEK RAMASWAMY DONATES $30K

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos said that former President Trump showed "grace and courage under literal fire" during the assassination attempt. (Photo by Stefan Rousseau/PA Images via Getty Images / Getty Images)

Bezos' expression of support for Trump in the wake of the assassination attempt comes after the billionaire, who owns the Washington Post, has previously faced criticism from Trump amid a public feud. 

Trump wrote in January 2019 that he was, "So sorry to hear the news about Jeff Bozo being taken down by a competitor whose reporting, I understand, is far more accurate than the reporting in his lobbyist newspaper, the Amazon Washington Post."

ELON MUSK SAYS HE 'FULLY ENDORSES' TRUMP AFTER GUNFIRE AT PENNSYLVANIA RALLY

Secret Service personnel lead former President Trump offstage during the assassination attempt on July 13, 2024. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images / Getty Images)

Amazon noted the dispute in a legal filing it made after its cloud services division, Amazon Web Services, lost a $10 billion Department of Defense contract to Microsoft in 2019. The company alleged that it lost the contract to its rival because Trump sought to harm "his perceived political enemy."

The Pentagon canceled the contract in 2021 and in late 2022 announced that it would split a $9 billion cloud computing contract between Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Oracle.

Former President Trump was grazed in his right ear in the assassination attempt. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images / Getty Images)

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Amazon CEO Andy Jassy , who has led the tech giant since 2021, also posted on social media about the attempted assassination of the former president.

"It's hard to digest what happened in Pennsylvania today. Just awful. My thoughts go out to the victims' families. Glad that President Trump is safe and hoping he recovers quickly," Jassy wrote.

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Elon Musk’s Plan to Put a Million Earthlings on Mars in 20 Years

SpaceX employees are working on designs for a Martian city, including dome habitats and spacesuits, and researching whether humans can procreate off Earth. Mr. Musk has volunteered his sperm.

Credit... Gica Tam

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By Kirsten Grind

Reporting from San Francisco

• Published July 11, 2024 Updated July 12, 2024

For more than two decades, Elon Musk has focused SpaceX , his rocket company, on his lifelong goal of reaching Mars.

Over the last year, he has also ramped up work on what will happen if he gets there.

Mr. Musk, 53, has directed SpaceX employees to drill into the design and details of a Martian city, according to five people with knowledge of the efforts and documents viewed by The New York Times. One team is drawing up plans for small dome habitats, including the materials that could be used to build them. Another is working on spacesuits to combat Mars’s hostile environment, while a medical team is researching whether humans can have children there. Mr. Musk has volunteered his sperm to help seed a colony, two people familiar with his comments said.

The initiatives, which are in their infancy, are a shift toward more concrete planning for life on Mars as Mr. Musk’s timeline has hastened. While he said in 2016 that it would take 40 to 100 years to have a self-sustaining civilization on the planet, Mr. Musk told SpaceX employees in April that he now expects one million people to be living there in about 20 years.

“There’s high urgency to making life multi-planetary,” he said, according to a publicly posted video of his remarks. “We’ve got to do it while civilization is so strong.”

Mr. Musk has long tried to defy the impossible and has often managed to beat tough odds. But his vision for life on Mars takes his seemingly limitless ambitions to their most extreme — and some might say absurdist — point. No one has ever set foot on the planet. NASA doesn’t expect to land humans on Mars until the 2040s. And if people get there, they will be greeted by a barren terrain, icy temperatures, dust storms, and air that is impossible to breathe.

Yet Mr. Musk is so wedded to the idea of creating a civilization on Mars — he once said he plans to die there — that it has propelled nearly every business endeavor he has undertaken on Earth. His vision for Mars underlies most of the six companies that he leads or owns, each of which could potentially contribute to an extraterrestrial colony, according to the documents and the people with knowledge of the efforts.

The Boring Company, a private tunneling venture founded by Mr. Musk, was started in part to ready equipment to burrow under Mars’s surface, two of the people said. Mr. Musk has told people that he bought X , the social media platform, partly to help test how a citizen-led government that rules by consensus might work on Mars. He has also said that he envisions residents on the planet will drive a version of the steel-paneled Cybertrucks made by Tesla, his electric vehicle company.

Mr. Musk, who is worth about $270 billion , has publicly declared that he only accumulates assets — which include a roughly $47 billion Tesla pay package — to fund his plans for Mars.

“It’s a way to get humanity to Mars, because establishing a self-sustaining city on Mars will require a lot of resources,” he testified in court in 2022 about his Tesla pay.

Whether Mr. Musk can achieve his vision for a Martian colony in his lifetime is debatable.

“You can’t just land one million people on Mars,” said Robert Zubrin, an aerospace engineer who has known Mr. Musk for 20 years and wrote the book “The Case for Mars.” Any colonization of the planet would unfold over decades, he said.

Mr. Zubrin added that Mr. Musk is being particularly distracted from his Mars ambitions by his recent work on X. The tech billionaire often faces criticism for being spread too thin among the companies he runs.

While Mr. Musk has spoken about Mars for years and SpaceX released two basic drawings of a colony around 2018, many specifics and the company’s shift toward civilization planning haven’t previously been reported. Mr. Musk has largely kept the colonization plans quiet because SpaceX, under a $2.9 billion contract with NASA, must first send a rocket to the moon , two people with knowledge of the company said.

The Times interviewed more than 20 people close to Mr. Musk and SpaceX about the plans for a Martian city and reviewed internal documents, emails, social media posts and legal documents. Many of the people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they had signed nondisclosure agreements.

Even they were skeptical that Mr. Musk would build a Martian city in his lifetime. Some of them said he was just trying to best Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder who envisions humans living in giant space stations throughout the solar system. Mr. Musk has laid out an aggressive timeline for Mars to make them work harder, others said. Drawings of the colony are sometimes referred to as a “hype package,” two of them said.

Mr. Musk and SpaceX didn’t respond to requests for comment. In a post on X after this article was published, Mr. Musk said he had not volunteered his sperm and that no one at SpaceX had been directed to work on a Martian city. “When people have asked to do so, I’ve said we need to focus on getting there first,” he wrote.

Saving Humanity

Mr. Musk has been fascinated by Mars since reading Isaac Asimov ’s 1951 science fiction novel, “Foundation,” when he was 10. In the book, the protagonist builds a colony across a galaxy to save humanity from the fall of an interstellar empire.

“They find a planet far away from the galactic center and try to preserve human knowledge and civilization there while the center of the galaxy kind of falls apart,” Mr. Musk said in a 2013 interview for a science video.

In 2001, Mr. Musk tried buying a Russian rocket to reach Mars, said Jim Cantrell, a former SpaceX employee who visited Russia with him that year. But after three trips, the Russians refused to sell, and one official spit on Mr. Musk’s shoes, Mr. Cantrell said.

In 2002, Mr. Musk founded SpaceX, a privately held company in Hawthorne, Calif. It eventually created partly reusable rockets and landed government contracts, including with NASA. In recent years, it started Starlink , a satellite internet service that has expanded worldwide.

To reach Mars, SpaceX has built Starship, a nearly 400-foot reusable rocket. Starship’s immediate purpose is to take NASA astronauts to the moon , though it might later ferry residents to Mars and could also act as a small space station.

A future version of Starship may have a living space in its nose, three people familiar with the rocket said. Plans call for several floors of living quarters, with amenities like a running track and a movie theater, two of the people said. One drawing of Starship’s interior, a version of which Mr. Musk has posted on X, shows a violinist hovering in zero gravity as she plays for a crowd.

Starship may carry 100 passengers at a time to Mars, a journey that would happen about every two years, Mr. Musk told the International Astronautical Congress in a 2016 presentation. NASA has said a trip to Mars, located about 140 million miles from Earth, would take up to nine months.

In 2018, SpaceX engineers gathered with university researchers and others for a private meeting in Colorado to discuss the technology needed to survive on Mars, according to notes of the meeting obtained by The Times. Topics included harvesting ice to make water and selecting the right area on Mars to build a colony.

By last year, the latest versions of Starship had been built at Starbase, a SpaceX facility in Boca Chica, Texas . In June, Starship successfully returned from a test flight to space for the first time.

Colony Planning

Over the years, Mr. Musk has dropped hints about how he thinks people would live on Mars.

One theme revolves around the continuation of human life on the planet. Scientists haven’t determined whether people can have children in space. Mr. Musk has said children won’t be allowed on the first flights to Mars because of the dangers, though he expects them to live there eventually.

But Mr. Musk has a plan. In his 2013 interview for the science video, he said he hoped to create his own species on Mars, an idea that he has repeated over the years to SpaceX employees and others close to the company.

“I think it’s quite likely that we’d want to bioengineer new organisms that are better suited to living on Mars,” he said in the interview. “Humanity’s kind of done that over time, by sort of selective breeding.”

He also has a strategy for warmth. In a 2022 podcast interview , he said he would tackle the planet’s icy temperatures with a series of thermonuclear explosions that would warm the planet by creating artificial suns. Hundreds of solar panels, potentially built by Tesla , will help heat homes and create energy, three people familiar with his plans said.

Mr. Musk’s pronouncements have in recent months shifted into more concrete planning by SpaceX employees.

The industrial design team has been creating and updating renderings for a city, two people said. The colony will center on a giant dome for communal living, with smaller domes scattered around it. Discussions have lately focused on what materials to use for the domes. Mr. Musk is particularly concerned with making sure the city looks cool, two other people said.

One internal drawing obtained by The Times shows a family with young children standing in a dome neighborhood, gazing up at the stars.

In April, Mr. Musk told SpaceX employees that the Mars colony would be self-sustaining in case something happened to Earth and rockets couldn’t reach it anymore.

To achieve that, Mr. Musk plans to use Starship as sort of a Noah’s Ark, carrying plants and animals on the initial voyage, three people familiar with the plans said. Residents would then build greenhouses on Mars to grow food.

SpaceX has partnered with Impossible Foods, the plant-based alternative meat company, to provide food in SpaceX’s cafeterias, but also to test the products as a possible protein source for Mars, two of the people said.

Civilization Secured?

Like Mr. Musk, many of SpaceX’s more than 12,000 employees believe in life on another planet, according to the people familiar with the company and documents viewed by The Times. Workers sometimes wear “Occupy Mars” or “Rocket Parent” T-shirts to work and post suggestions for the Mars colony on an internal site. One recent idea was to build the city on the side of a giant crater.

Some employees working on the Mars plans are based in Boca Chica, while others from the Southern California office fly in on Mondays and leave on Fridays. Many work more than 100 hours a week.

The Boca Chica site has an industrial complex called Stargate, with an office that some liken to being in a Las Vegas casino because the lack of windows makes it hard to tell if it is day or night, three people said. A new office under construction there will have more windows, they said. Current and former employees said the Boca Chica site has sometimes lacked basic safety protocols, like caution tape around dangerous equipment.

SpaceX has grappled with a lawsuit and a complaint from the National Labor Relations Board related to eight former employees who said they were fired for complaining about Mr. Musk’s behavior and for making allegations of sexual harassment and discrimination at the company. SpaceX hasn’t responded to the lawsuit and has sued the N.L.R.B., claiming it acted unconstitutionally.

Still, some employees said it was worth working there to create a Mars colony.

In a recent goodbye email viewed by The Times, a female SpaceX manager who worked on the Mars program described “brutal” hours and conditions, especially for working parents. But she also said the company was “an astonishing place” and that she would “trade this experience for nothing.”

Mr. Musk’s presence in Boca Chica has waned recently, people familiar with the company said. He visits about once a month, sometimes in the middle of the night for a few hours with his toddler son X Æ A-12, two of the people said, compared with at least once a week previously.

Yet his resolve for a Martian civilization appears unbowed.

In May, a NASA official said that the agency didn’t expect to land humans on Mars until the 2040s. That same month, Mr. Musk posted on X that it would take less than 10 years to send people there and that there would be a Martian city in about 20 years.

“For sure in 30, civilization secured,” he wrote.

Kirsten Grind is an investigative business reporter writing stories about companies, chief executives and billionaires across Silicon Valley and the technology industry. More about Kirsten Grind

The World of Elon Musk

The billionaire’s portfolio includes the world’s most valuable automaker, an innovative rocket company and plenty of drama..

SpaceX:  Elon Musk has directed employees at his rocket company to drill into the design and details of a Martian city. Here’s what’s being discussed .

Tesla: Musk’s polarizing political statements  have alienated some potential customers and may be partly responsible for a recent slump in sales .

X: Leaders at Musk’s social media company, X, told employees this week that 65% of advertisers had returned  to the platform since January.

Starlink: The satellite-internet service has connected the Marubo people, an isolated tribe in the Amazon, to the outside world — and divided it from within .

Neuralink: Musk’s first human experiment with a computerized brain device developed significant flaws, but the subject, who is paralyzed, has few regrets .

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Jeff bezos to sell $5 billion in amazon shares: could he be raising cash for seattle seahawks purchase.

Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ: AMZN ) founder Jeff Bezos is selling another portion of his stake in the company, which comes years after stepping down from the CEO role .

What Happened: Bezos departed from Amazon’s c-suite in 2021, a role he held for the 27 years since the company was founded. The Amazon founder now serves as the e-commerce giant’s executive chair. He’s been selling a portion of his Amazon stake this year.

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Bezos sold $8.5 billion in shares in February . A Tuesday SEC filing by Amazon shows Bezos plans on selling 25 million Amazon shares valued at $4.93 billion.

The new sale would bring Bezos’ total sold to around $13.4 billion in stock in 2024. Bezos owns around 9% of Amazon shares, according to a report from the Financial Times.

What's Next : Bezos could be selling shares for a number of reasons. The Amazon founder is spending more time working on his space company Blue Origin and other ventures.

Bezos is also set to wed Lauren Sanchez and has spent more time vacationing aboard his $500 million yacht Koru, which costs $25 million annually to operate.

Speculation could grow that Bezos is raising cash to make a push to own a National Football League team. Bezos was previously linked with making a bid for the Washington Commanders, a D.C.-based NFL team.

Reports said Bezos may have been blocked from bidding due to a personal grudge held by former Commanders owner Daniel Snyder. In the end, Bezos didn't formally bid on the team and the Commanders were sold to a group for $6.05 billion.

Trending: How do billionaires pay less in income tax than you? Tax deferring is their number one strategy .

The sale was the largest in sports history, but could be topped if more NFL teams are sold in the future.

Bezos has been linked to making a push to buying the Seattle Seahawks. A previous Washington Post report said NFL owners support Bezos joining the league.

"Other owners have expressed a desire for Bezos to buy a team. Bezos could get that opportunity if he pursues the Seattle Seahawks. That team is expected to be sold in the coming years," the report said.

The report said, "Bezos knows that Seattle is sitting there."

The Seahawks, who were valued at $5 billion by Forbes last year, are owned by the Paul G. Allen Trust. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen previously owned the team before his death in 2018. The assets are expected to be sold in the coming years. Allen made instructions that the trust would be liquidated after his death with proceeds going to philanthropic efforts.

While Bezos may have moved from Seattle to Florida, the Amazon founder will forever be linked to the Washington city and the Seahawks could lure him back to the city, at least on a part-time basis.

One lingering question mark could be whether the NFL would approve a sale to Bezos with Amazon.com having broadcast rights to Thursday Night Football games.

Bezos is worth $222 billion , ranking second in the world in wealth behind Elon Musk ($241 billion), according to Bloomberg.

AMZN Price Action: Amazon shares are down 1% to $197.82 Wednesday after hitting new all-time highs of $200.43 on Tuesday.

Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are bullish on one city that could dethrone New York and become the new financial capital of the US. Investing in its booming real estate market has never been more accessible.

Will the surge continue or decline on real estate prices? People are finding out about risk-free real estate investing with just $100

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This article Jeff Bezos To Sell $5 Billion In Amazon Shares: Could He Be Raising Cash For Seattle Seahawks Purchase? originally appeared on Benzinga.com

© 2024 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.

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William Shatner experienced profound grief in space. It was the 'overview effect'

Enrique Rivera

Star Trek actor William Shatner flew into space on October 13, 2021. Mario Tama/Getty Images hide caption

Star Trek actor William Shatner flew into space on October 13, 2021.

William Shatner is probably the most famous astronaut in the world. But of course, he's not an astronaut. He's an actor. The 91-year-old Canadian has been an icon since he played Captain Kirk in the original Star Trek series, which debuted in 1966.

But Captain Kirk, er, William Shatner, did actually go to space — last year, aboard a capsule piloted by Jeff Bezos's company Blue Origin. Shatner details his experiences in his new memoir Boldly Go .

"I was crying," Shatner told NPR. "I didn't know what I was crying about. I had to go off some place and sit down and think, what's the matter with me? And I realized I was in grief."

Hubble's 1995 image of a star nursery was amazing. Take a look at NASA's new version

While he wasn't sure what to expect, Shatner did not predict this . He had been excited to travel to space, and had thought about it for nearly 60 years, but didn't think he'd be overwhelmed with sadness, or that he'd go through "the strongest feelings of grief" that he's ever experienced.

There's a name for what Shatner felt: it's called the "overview effect." The term was coined by space philosopher Frank White in his 1987 book of the same name.

"The overview effect is a cognitive and emotional shift in a person's awareness, their consciousness and their identity when they see the Earth from space," White told NPR. "They're at a distance and they're seeing the Earth ... in the context of the universe."

The overview effect is known to affect astronauts. NASA/Getty Images hide caption

The overview effect is known to affect astronauts.

This context was what struck Shatner the most.

"It was the death that I saw in space and the lifeforce that I saw coming from the planet — the blue, the beige and the white," he said. "And I realized one was death and the other was life."

According to White, everyone who travels to space experiences an "overview effect" — an emotional or mental reaction strong enough to disrupt that person's previous assumptions about humanity, Earth, and/or the cosmos. Everyone's overview effect is unique to them, but there are reactions that are more common than others.

White has interviewed more than 40 astronauts, and says that Shatner's response is typical. "People often cry when they first see the Earth from space," he said.

"I wept for the Earth because I realized it's dying," Shatner said. "I dedicated my book, Boldly Go , to my great-grandchild, who's three now — coming three — and in the dedication, say it's them, those youngsters, who are going to reap what we have sown in terms of the destruction of the Earth."

Astronauts often return with a greater distaste for war

After traveling to space, astronauts gain a greater understanding of how precious, and delicate, the Earth is. Many astronauts report that they were aware of climate change and global warming, but they became much more sensitive to the subject after traveling to space.

White said that one astronaut told him that the biggest lesson they learned from space travel was "the difference between intellectual knowledge and experiential knowledge."

"I saw more clearly than I have, with all the studying and reading I've done, the writhing, slow death of Earth and we on it," Shatner said.

"It's a little tiny rock with an onion skin air around it. That's how fragile it all is. It's so fragile. We hang by a thread ... we're just dangling."

The New Shepard rocket launched on October 13, 2021 with Shatner on board. Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

The New Shepard rocket launched on October 13, 2021 with Shatner on board.

Although we are just dangling, Shatner adds that we're dangling together.

"We're entangled with each other," he said, decrying conflicts between human beings. "We have a war ... the stupidity of it all is so obvious."

Like Shatner, astronauts often return from space more convinced of the interconnectedness of humanity. According to White, space travelers return to our planet with "a greater distaste for war and violence, and a desire to do something to improve life back on the surface, because they've seen the truth of our situation."

And although the truth may not be pretty, a more universal perspective can only aid in reconnecting our long disconnected species. White says that astronauts return more eager than ever to be part of the solution, so that humanity may, one day, live long and prosper.

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Yury Gagarin Cosmonauts Training Centre (Zvezdny Gorodok - Star Town) (7 hours)

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The Yuri A. Gagarin State Scientific Research-and-Testing Cosmonaut Training Center is a Russian training facility responsible for training cosmonauts for their space missions. It is in Star City of Moscow Oblast, a name which may refer to the facility itself or to its grounds. (Read more about Yury Gagarin Cosmonauts training center )

The secret Star City was built to train Soviet cosmonauts, including Yuri Gagarin, the 1st man in space. Many other famous Russian cosmonauts trained here with Gagarin: German Titov, Valentina Tereshkova, the first female cosmonaut, and Alexei Leonov, the first cosmonaut to exit the spaceship into space . The best facilities were built for them: the world’s largest centrifuge and hydro laboratory. Many cosmonauts from other countries (USA, Japan, Germany and many others) also have trained here together with Soviet Russian cosmonauts. On this Star (Space) City Tour you will see:

• Models of Soyuz Soviet spacecraft 
• World's largest centrifuge with an 18-meter radius 
• Hydro laboratory, with the model of the International Space Station in water, which allows to simulate the weightlessness and many more

Important info

Ask a travel expert.

• Professional English-speaking guide assistance. Other languages upon request (additional charge may apply)
• Roundtrip transportation to and from your central hotel (Comfortable car/minivan with A/C)
• Fully private tour to ensure a personalized experience
• Entrance fee to Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre (territory)
• Entrance fee to Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre Museum
• All taxes, fees and handling charges
• Food  / Drinks
• Personal expenses
• Gratuities to guide/driver (optional)

The tour price already includes all the taxes & fees, you will not see any of them later during the checkout.

Adult pricing applies to all travelers

IMPORTANT! To book the tours please provide us with the copy of your passport (scan of page with photo) and the following information (for all the travellers):

1. Surname / Names (as in passport) 2. Passport number 3. Passport expiry date 4. Date of birth 5. Place of birth (country, city, state) 6. Place of current residence (country, city, state) 7. Citizenship 8. Place of work 9. Position held 

This information is required to get access to the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre, as per their security policy.

If it took Gagarin 1 year to get prepared, now it takes 7 years to become a cosmonaut, and 50 days to pass  security  check for foreign visitors.

Due to the security policy of the Centre, the guided tours are to be arranged in 50 days before the tour date. Last-minute arrangements are not available. 

Departure: from your Moscow hotel

Return: to your Moscow hotel (or any other place in Moscow that you choose)

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Elektrostal, visit elektrostal, check elektrostal hotel availability, popular places to visit.

• Electrostal History and Art Museum

You can spend time exploring the galleries in Electrostal History and Art Museum in Elektrostal. Take in the museums while you're in the area.

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Rusmania • Deep into Russia

Out of the Centre

Savvino-storozhevsky monastery and museum.

Zvenigorod's most famous sight is the Savvino-Storozhevsky Monastery, which was founded in 1398 by the monk Savva from the Troitse-Sergieva Lavra, at the invitation and with the support of Prince Yury Dmitrievich of Zvenigorod. Savva was later canonised as St Sabbas (Savva) of Storozhev. The monastery late flourished under the reign of Tsar Alexis, who chose the monastery as his family church and often went on pilgrimage there and made lots of donations to it. Most of the monastery’s buildings date from this time. The monastery is heavily fortified with thick walls and six towers, the most impressive of which is the Krasny Tower which also serves as the eastern entrance. The monastery was closed in 1918 and only reopened in 1995. In 1998 Patriarch Alexius II took part in a service to return the relics of St Sabbas to the monastery. Today the monastery has the status of a stauropegic monastery, which is second in status to a lavra. In addition to being a working monastery, it also holds the Zvenigorod Historical, Architectural and Art Museum.

Belfry and Neighbouring Churches

Located near the main entrance is the monastery's belfry which is perhaps the calling card of the monastery due to its uniqueness. It was built in the 1650s and the St Sergius of Radonezh’s Church was opened on the middle tier in the mid-17th century, although it was originally dedicated to the Trinity. The belfry's 35-tonne Great Bladgovestny Bell fell in 1941 and was only restored and returned in 2003. Attached to the belfry is a large refectory and the Transfiguration Church, both of which were built on the orders of Tsar Alexis in the 1650s.  

To the left of the belfry is another, smaller, refectory which is attached to the Trinity Gate-Church, which was also constructed in the 1650s on the orders of Tsar Alexis who made it his own family church. The church is elaborately decorated with colourful trims and underneath the archway is a beautiful 19th century fresco.

Nativity of Virgin Mary Cathedral

The Nativity of Virgin Mary Cathedral is the oldest building in the monastery and among the oldest buildings in the Moscow Region. It was built between 1404 and 1405 during the lifetime of St Sabbas and using the funds of Prince Yury of Zvenigorod. The white-stone cathedral is a standard four-pillar design with a single golden dome. After the death of St Sabbas he was interred in the cathedral and a new altar dedicated to him was added.

Under the reign of Tsar Alexis the cathedral was decorated with frescoes by Stepan Ryazanets, some of which remain today. Tsar Alexis also presented the cathedral with a five-tier iconostasis, the top row of icons have been preserved.

Tsaritsa's Chambers

The Nativity of Virgin Mary Cathedral is located between the Tsaritsa's Chambers of the left and the Palace of Tsar Alexis on the right. The Tsaritsa's Chambers were built in the mid-17th century for the wife of Tsar Alexey - Tsaritsa Maria Ilinichna Miloskavskaya. The design of the building is influenced by the ancient Russian architectural style. Is prettier than the Tsar's chambers opposite, being red in colour with elaborately decorated window frames and entrance.

At present the Tsaritsa's Chambers houses the Zvenigorod Historical, Architectural and Art Museum. Among its displays is an accurate recreation of the interior of a noble lady's chambers including furniture, decorations and a decorated tiled oven, and an exhibition on the history of Zvenigorod and the monastery.

Palace of Tsar Alexis

The Palace of Tsar Alexis was built in the 1650s and is now one of the best surviving examples of non-religious architecture of that era. It was built especially for Tsar Alexis who often visited the monastery on religious pilgrimages. Its most striking feature is its pretty row of nine chimney spouts which resemble towers.

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