> I see the last two launches as indeed amusement rides for billionaires
I see this take a lot, and I strongly disagree.
These launches are marketing events for their space tourism businesses! The billionaire CEOs go up to prove they personally trust the tech is safe. If they won't go, who else would?
Now they can start selling trips to paying customers, and hopefully build genuinely sustainable space tourism businesses. The fairly minimal experience of these short jumps will be improved gradually, and that future is impossible to predict, as it is completely novel territory.
> These launches are marketing events for their space tourism businesses!
Okay, so these launches aren't amusement rides for billionaires, they are marketing stunts to advertise amusement rides for other billionaires? Hard to see the difference tbh
These rides are being sold for a few hundred thousand dollars. Before New Shepard and SpaceShipTwo, the only private tourists to space paid tens of millions. That is a huge decrease in price! Now any millionaire can afford it, and it is just within reach of an upper middle class person willing to save for a significant part of their life. Some people couldn't care less about this, but others have dreamed of flying into space ever since Yuri Gagarin, and it is finally a reality.
And like all things, the price will go down. Not as fast as I'd like for these specific crafts, but they seemed like a good target at the time their development began.
s/billionaires/millionaires isn't a very compelling argument in my opinion. It's still a huge waste all so some rich people can float in zero-g for a few minutes so making it accessable to a few million people instead of a few thousand doesn't seem like a win to me.
I see this take a lot, and I strongly disagree.
These launches are marketing events for their space tourism businesses! The billionaire CEOs go up to prove they personally trust the tech is safe. If they won't go, who else would?
Now they can start selling trips to paying customers, and hopefully build genuinely sustainable space tourism businesses. The fairly minimal experience of these short jumps will be improved gradually, and that future is impossible to predict, as it is completely novel territory.