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Space The Almighty Buck

Virgin Galactic Says Trips To Space Aboard Its Rocket Plane Will Start At $450,000 Per Seat (cbsnews.com) 66

Posted by BeauHD from the commercial-space-flights dept.
After a successful sub-orbital test flight last month, Virgin Galactic re-opened ticket sales for rides to space starting at $450,000 per seat. CBS News reports: But Michael Colglazier, CEO of Virgin Galactic, said fully commercial flights are not expected until the third quarter of 2022, after two more test flights of the company's VSS Unity spaceplane and extensive upgrades of Virgin's Eve carrier jet to improve durability and turnaround times between flights. While the start of commercial operations will come a few months later than had been hoped, the results of two piloted test flights earlier this year, including Branson's July 11 trip to space, show the company is close to "completing our test flight program and launching commercial passenger service in '22," Colglazier said. "And as we advance towards that goal, we are excited to announce today that we will immediately open ticket sales to our significant list of early hand raisers, prioritizing our spacefarer community who, as promised, will be given first opportunity to reserve their place to space."

He said Virgin has developed a "purposeful range of product offerings in order to satisfy the different ways people were want to share this experience." "For the private astronaut flights, our products will include a single seat, a multi-seat couples, families and friends package and a full-flight buyout," he said. "Prices for this next phase of private astronaut sales will begin at $450,000 per seat. Microgravity research and professional astronaut training flights remain priced at $600,000 on a per seat equivalent basis." More than 600 space enthusiasts made down payments on flights much earlier in the program, back when tickets were thought to be in the neighborhood of $250,000 per seat. The prices announced Thursday presumably will apply to new customers only.
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Virgin Galactic Says Trips To Space Aboard Its Rocket Plane Will Start At $450,000 Per Seat More

Virgin Galactic Says Trips To Space Aboard Its Rocket Plane Will Start At $450,000 Per Seat

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  • Did we decide to just skip the flying cars?

    • Re:So... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Saturday August 07, 2021 @06:31AM (#61666495)

      That's basically an amusement park ride for the super rich, not a means of transport.

      • People coming to the new world used a good chunk of life savings to do it. Now it costs a thousand dollars and takes six hours.

        • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

          by Opportunist ( 166417 )

          While true, do you think that the people paying their life savings had anything to do with that? If anything, wouldn't it be a lot more profitable to have people still pay their lifetime savings for the trip?

          • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

            by Entrope ( 68843 )

            More profitable for whom? A cartel that artificially maintains a sky-high price? The first honest competitor would drop prices to half or a tenth, and capture all the customers, driving the "more profitable" model out of business. That would repeat until profit margins were fairly thin, but sustainable.

            Technology will improve. The basic energy costs involved, and current lack of in-orbit resources to exploit, mean that we shouldn't expect to see space travel become as cheap as intercontinental flight is

            • So far the theory. The same theory that should give us affordable and fast internet connection in areas where monopolies keep milking customers dry for crappy, unreliable and slow connections, but there isn't any competition because the setup fee is higher than any revenue you could expect to get.

              You think it would be different for trips to space?

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by Entrope ( 68843 )

                Natural monopolies, like high-speed network infrastructure to small consumers, show very different behavior than competitive markets with fungible goods. Spaceflight is -- rather obviously -- much more like air flight than like home broadband connections.

                • Well... no. In air travel, the vehicles are not created by the operators. You have the likes of Boeing and Airbus manufacturing vehicles and selling them to the likes of United and Lufthansa, which creates a much more open and level market.

                  In space travel, as in communications, the infrastructure to deliver the goods and the company delivering them are in the same hands. In other words, it would be like wanting to compete with Lufthansa and Delta while also having to make your own aircraft.

                  If that changes,

            • A cartel that artificially maintains a sky-high price? The first honest competitor would drop prices to half or a tenth,

              You could shave one tenth off, but you're not going to reduce to a tenth.
              There's a hard limit of how cheap you can go to space and it's a limit set by the law of physics:
              It's the rocket fuel equation or Tsiolkovsky rocket equation.

              To reach a certain orbit, you need to gain the corresponding speed.
              To reach that speed, you need to burn a giant amount of fuel.
              Except that this huge amount of fuel has its own weight which is very large and significant.
              So you need even more fuel to accelerate that additional weig

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by zlives ( 2009072 )

                Just wait till i setup my tracked backyard railgun launcher to LEO

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by Entrope ( 68843 )

                The specific hypothetical was a lifetime of savings to cross the Atlantic. That's considerably more than ten times the current price for such a plane ticket, so reducing the price from "lifetime of savings" to a tenth of that is entirely feasible.

                • The specific hypothetical was a lifetime of savings to cross the Atlantic. That's considerably more than ten times the current price for such a plane ticket, so reducing the price from "lifetime of savings" to a tenth of that is entirely feasible.

                  There's a big difference in goal.

                  - Back then, it was mostly middle class people who either spent all their saving (or found some ultra-rich sponsor) and crossed the Atlantic seeking their fortune. (Although there weren't necessary successful in the end).

                  - Currently Space tourism is just a glorifed "amusement park ride for the ultrarich" as pointed out earlier in this thread. It's mostly a bunch of millionaire doing this for thrill of doing it. It doesn't serve any further purpose than that (at least for the

        • Re:So... (Score:4, Interesting)

          by Rei ( 128717 ) on Saturday August 07, 2021 @08:01AM (#61666603) Homepage

          There is nothing scalable about the design Virgin Galactic has used. It's repeating the X-15 half a century later and charging half a million dollars per seat.

          Also, pilgrims on the Mayflower traveled for free. They were actually paid, in the form of a share in the Virginia Company. In turn, they worked building the settlement in the chartered land for 7 years. At the end of the 7 years, the Virginia Company would be liquidated, and assets in the chartered land would be divided up among shareholders proportional to their assets. An investor who did not travel and simply paid for shares (the investments that funded the ship and provisions) would end up with huge landholdings with untapped resources in a settled land if the venture was a success. A poor labourer who immigrated to the New World would still end up with a plot of land and home of their own, something that they could only have dreamed of in their old life.

      • Re: So... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Midnight Thunder ( 17205 ) on Saturday August 07, 2021 @09:15AM (#61666699) Homepage Journal

        While it may be an amusement ride for the super rich, I also put this in the early adopter category. The current customers get an opportunity to spend large amounts of money, that will facilitate R&D, so that over time new developments lower the cost.

        Just because many of us canâ(TM)t afford a ride on these space vehicles, doesnâ(TM)t mean that they shouldnâ(TM)t mean anything. On the other hand Iâ(TM)d rather try Virgin Galactic than Blue Origin, partly because of the non-conventional launch method and partly because Blue Originâ(TM)s experience looked like a cheap amusement park ride, that you got to send a fortune on.

        • Can anyone in the Slashdot team tell us why they canâ(TM)t fix their engine to support modern day text items such as curly quotes, and UTF8?

          • The database and most of the source code supports it. You can find some old slashdot articles where the comments include UTF8, causing some problems.

            Later they added some regex filters and substitutions to prevent those problems. The original person who wrote those regexes and substitutions has left, and they are too confusing to figure out. (Or rather, it takes time to figure it out. Nothing is ever too confusing).

            We can see that a programmer at Slashdot has been looking at that are of code, because they'v

        • What I wonder, aside from how high you go, does not the Vomit Comet give you more time in free fall for far less money?

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by hey! ( 33014 )

        For $20,000 the Russians will give you a ride in MIG-29 to 17-22 km, high enough for the sky above you to become dark and stars visible. The only thing you really get for an additional $430,000 is bragging rights. Oh, there's three minutes of weightlessness, but there's companies that offer twice that much on a vomet comet type airplane ride for $7500 -- from a physics standpoint it's exactly the same phenomenon.

      • To a billionaire, 450k is like about 45 dollars for an average person. It's not much at all for such an amusement park ride. For the merely wealthy, 450K is probably about like 450 dollars. It's not much more than a day at any major theme park, as a percentage of their wealth or earnings.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by taustin ( 171655 )

        Indeed. And other than altitude, you can get the same experience (with twice as much freefall time) from Zero-G [gozerog.com] for $7,500.

    • No. We have small planes and helicopters. What else were you expecting?

  • Expensive train ticket. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mustafap ( 452510 ) on Saturday August 07, 2021 @06:36AM (#61666499) Homepage

    So, Virgin Galactic's vertical journey of 160 km costs $450K. A similar horizontal journey, Dublin to Belfast, is 40 Euro or 47$. 10,000 times more expensive to go vertical rather than horizontal. Gravity really sucks.

  • Hopefully this isn't like a budget airline and the flight Earth to Earth doesn't drop you off at Mars because it's in the locality but has lower landing taxes.

  • I saw an article from 2013 with prices around 75k for 30km for helium balloons.

    or Space Perspective for 125k at up to 100k feet.

    If you're going to pay $450k, I'd really want some serious amount of time orbiting, maybe visiting the ISS or whatever China has tossed into orbit.

  • For that amount of money I'd want to go at least to the Karman line which the rest of the world considers the edge of space. Incidentally it's also the edge NASA considered the edge of space before they appeased the US Defense Department who stubbornly wouldn't adopt the correct definition and instead adopted the "no pilot left behind participation award" approach to declaring someone an astronaut simply by redefining the term (which quite humorously or rather posthumously ;-) caused two pilots to be reclas

  • Very expensive pollution emitters for the wealthy (Score:4, Insightful)

    by The Real Dr John ( 716876 ) on Saturday August 07, 2021 @08:22AM (#61666633) Homepage

    No problem here, rich people spending gobs of money to really help pollute the atmosphere intensely for a few minute joy ride. Next time you hear any of them talk about saving the planet, just laugh at them.

    • Next time you hear any of them talk about saving the planet, just laugh at them.

      Why would I be so ignorant. Do you honestly think a short joy ride is even a drop of piss in the ocean compared to the energy we actively use in our daily lives?

      For example my flight to Greece next week will cost me roughly 500kg of CO2. I use an order of magnitude more than that just on electricity in my small (very efficient by European standards, and fucking efficient compared to USA standards) unit. To say nothing of my car emissions just driving to work.

  • At $250K a pop I was thinking to bring a few friends along. $450K? I think I'll sit out out this one.

  • I guess Elon will soon fly people to the moon for half that money. :-)

  • will it still be a lucrative business?
  • I used to watch this kind of news, the price tag for an space travel, as something that only selfish rich people can pay. The price tag is so high that it does not make sense for 15 minutes weightless experience to pay that, so only the super rich careless people will pay for that, while there would be so many good uses for that money. But I think I'm looking it wrong. Those price tags may be high today, but the money of those selfish rich people are going to pay the wages of "regular people" working on thi
    • I think we'll need a whole new form of propulsion to get it down that cheap. Even just counting the fuel cost alone you'd need a dramatic reduction in that to reach $500pp, and I don't see fuel getting much cheaper.
  • When I was working at Amundsen Scott base at the South Pole, there were regular flights of tourists who were flown in for $50K-$100K basically to take selfies in front of the big striped pole. Its a pretty unpleasant trip - a long series of flights, then landing at the high altitude base where everyone feels miserable for the first few days. Tourists would stay in a fancy tent camp overnight, then go home. For a smiilar amount (maybe a bit more) you can get a helicopter to the North Pole. So this roll
  • If I paid $450k for a plane ticket, I'd want it to land some place other than where it took off.

  • Say your lifetime dream was to go into space, but you're middle class with no inheritors. Well, imagine one day just around retirement, with your house paid off, you find out you have terminal cancer. You can sell or mortgage the house and this is doable at that time, isn't it? It would be a great legacy for your money to help fund aerospace employment/engineers/industry too.

  • That initial price of $250 grand was interesting and (marginally) doable. I have better things to spend $450 grand on. I guess I'll have to settle for a zero g flight for my next big birthday...

    ...laura

  • Dear assholes, enjoy your ultra brief trip to (possibly) space as ballast in a rocket. At best nobody will care at your non-achievement, at worst, the disintegrated charbroiled bits of your corpse will feed some desert critters.

  • It's not really even going to space, it's barely suborbital and they lack a lot of delta-v to really make into an orbit and have real space tourism, such as space hotel and such longer stays than a few seconds.

  • As the title says toys for rich people. Along with America's cup boats, super yachts, super cars, blah blah. Or perhaps more accurately toys for our feudal overlords.
  • i couldn't stop laughing. my mortgage costs $340,000. :D
  • ...MEH. It's a rich person's game.

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