Blue Origin Wants to Take Tourists into Space in 2018

We probably don’t need to tell you that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is the founder of Blue Origin – the private space travel company that aims to make space tourism a reality. Actually, the company plans to take tourists into space a lot sooner that originally anticipated, 2018 to be more specific. Journalists who recently visited the Blue Origin Washington state headquarters were informed by Bezos himself that groups of up to six people might be able to embark on short trips into space and experience weightlessness just two years from now. Obviously, the success of this project is going to depend on numerous factors, one of which includes extensive rocket testing.

However, before the service will be made available for consumers, the company will launch a series of piloted test flights in 2017. By the end of 2016, Blue Origin is scheduled to begin testing procedures on its new BE-4 engine, and even though the company is not accepting any deposits for these space journeys right now, it looks like thousands of potential customers have already expressed their interest in the project. Even though Blue Origin is not covered as much in the media, at least when compared to Elon Musk’s SpaceX program, things are going to change in the near future as Bezos plans to make the company’s endeavors more transparent.