Wrong idiom!

Right message, though. I’m talking about going into the blue sky here.

Who’s going? Another expedition?

No, this time it’s different. We are looking at space flights for tourists.

Oh, when?

Well, next year, if things go according to plans.

Whose plans?

Of Jeff Bezos, founder of online giant Amazon.

Ah, across the river, into the sky?

Well, sky is the limit for the master entrepreneur, if you ask me. He has been toying with the idea of space travel for quite some time now, and this week he announced his space travel firm, Blue Origin, will be able to launch test flights to space by 2017.

Commercial flights?

Not exactly. Bezos says the first batch of 2017 will not be paying customers, even though thousands have expressed interest in paying for a celestial sojourn.

What’s Bezos’ interest in this?

He says the idea of space travel has been his passion all along. And that’s why he gleaned a few millions off the profits of Amazon to set up a hi-tech facility for Blue Origin, which employs around 600 people.

But frankly can this venture ever be profitable?

It will, according to Bezos. Remember, another billionaire entrepreneur, Elon Musk of Tesla and SpaceX, has been sending rockets to the space and making good money out of it. And there are others, such as Steve Bigelow, a hotel king, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and computer games creator John D Carmack, who is funding Armadillo Aerospace, an aerospace startup in Texas. Armadillo wants to build a manned suborbital spacecraft capable of space tourism. And of course, the flamboyant Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic.

Space tourism! Great idea, but will it ever happen?

Yes, that’s exactly what the likes of Bezos and Musk have been trying to make a reality. But as you can guess, there are tall odds stacked up against them. To start with, this is a high-risk game and the losses can be gargantuan. Just last week, SpaceX failed to land a Falcon 9 rocket on a barge, striking a robot landing ship instead.

Bezos’ Blue Origin, founded in 2000, has launched a ship twice, and it landed safely. To be fair, it is not splurging money. It plans to keep testing until till the ship is fully used up and then it will move to other ships being built to test human flight.

So there will be revenues.

The real money, according to Bezos, will come from selling rocket engines to others planning to launch satellites and spaceships. Aerospace giant United Launch Alliance has asked Blue Origin to build the engine for its new launch vehicle as it wants to stop seeking help from the Russians. Experts say the future of space travel in general and space tourism in particular lies in building re-usable rockets and space shuttles. SpaceX is already a step ahead in this game.

Interesting!

Moreover, cheaper rockets will help government programmes immensely. Take Nasa for example. As things stand now, it pays the Russians $70 million per astronaut for each journey. Of course, this is a huge bill.

Blue Origin is focussing on smaller, lighter rockets which are easy to launch and land. Branson’s Virgin Galactic is also in the fray. Some 16 months after one of its test flights crashed, killing a pilot, it last month unveiled a new shuttle, VSS Unity, in California. Reports say more than 700 people have already signed up to fly on Virgin’s space trips, which will be launched from New Mexico. So, watch this space!

A weekly column that helps you ask the right questions

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