You can now buy a seat on a Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin rocket

ByJordan Valinsky, CNN Business, CNNWire
Friday, April 30, 2021
You can now buy a seat on a Blue Origin rocket
Blue Origin, the Jeff Bezos-backed space tourism venture, will soon begin selling tickets for its rocket.

PHILADELPHIA -- Blue Origin, the Jeff Bezos-backed space tourism venture, will soon begin selling tickets for its rocket.

The company made the announcement in a nearly minute-long video featuring Bezos himself. It points people to Blue Origin's website, which features a sign-up page for more information scheduled to be released May 5. Neither price nor dates were released Thursday.

New Shepard rocket, which was featured in the short video, has been on a number of test flights in recent years. Blue Origin eventually wants to send paying customers on brief joy rides to the edge of space.

New Shepard consists of two pieces - a small, dome-shaped capsule with gaping rectangular windows, and a 60-foot-tall rocket booster that blasts the capsule at up to three times the speed of sound as it hurtles toward outer space.

The capsule is designed to detach from the rocket near the top of its flight path, climbing more than 60 miles high and spending a few minutes suspended in weightlessness before parachuting back to Earth.

Bezos has said he is funding Blue Origin by selling about $1 billion worth of his Amazon stock each year.

--CNN Business' Jackie Wattles contributed to this report.

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