At the launch site of Blue Origin's New Shepard NS-18 before takeoff.
Mario Tama/Getty ImagesWilliam Shatner, aka Star Trek’s Captain Kirk, has gone where few men have gone before. He experienced zero gravity in space aboard a Blue Origin space tourism flight. He’s now the world’s only Star Fleet captain and astronaut.
“I’m going up into space. I don’t know how many people can say that. It’s life-changing, in its way,” said Shatner ahead of the launch. “We’re just at the beginning, but how miraculous that beginning is.”
The flight is a win for Blue Origin and the fledgling space tourism industry. The event also showed that Blue Origin has SpaceX-like ambitions. Tourism is only the first small step.
The flight—dubbed New Shepard NS-18—launched at 10:50 a.m. Eastern time. Blue Origin flights last about 10 minutes.
The 60-foot-tall rocket reached about 600 miles an hour a minute into the flight. The space capsule separated about three minutes in and continued into space—more than 100 kilometers above sea level—allowing the passengers to unbuckle. Space was reached in under four minutes. The reusable rocket landed at about 10:57 a.m. It’s the fourth flight for that booster. The space capsule returned safely to earth at 11 a.m.
“That’s unlike anything I’ve ever felt,” said Shatner during the descent.
The New Shepard rocket was powered by Blue Origin’s BE-3 engines. Each can produce about 110,000 foot pounds of thrust. Event host Ariane Cornell, Blue Origin’s senior director of astronaut and orbital sales, explained that the company is also working on larger BE-4 engines that can produce 550,000 foot pounds of thrust.
Those are the engines that will catapult Blue Origin into more segments of the commercial space business.
BE-4 engines are supposed to be on United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur rocket in 2022. That’s a large space launch system that competes with the likes of the SpaceX Falcon Heavy. United Launch Alliance is a 50/50 joint venture between Boeing (BA) and Lockheed Martin (LMT).
A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket is powered by 27 Merlin Engines. A Merlin engine generates about 185,000 foot pounds of thrust. SpaceX also has larger engines, dubbed Raptors, for larger space launch vehicles. Each Raptor can generate about 410,000 foot points of thrust.
All the specs mean, essentially, that Blue Origin wants to compete directly with SpaceX. Blue Origin engines can enable rockets from ULA to compete with Elon Musk’s space company.
The billionaire space competition is interesting to watch, but both companies are still privately held.
Virgin Galactic (ticker: SPCE) is a publicly traded space tourism player. Shares are up 1.8%, post-flight, at $23.93, in recent trading. Space tourism success, at this point, is good for everyone. The S&P 500 is up 0.2%. Th e Dow Jones Industrial Average is down 0.1%.
Still, Canaccord analyst Austin Moeller pointed out in a Wednesday research note that Galactic might need to gets its own “high-profile celebrities into space sooner rather than later to maintain momentum.” It doesn’t want to cede industry leadership to Blue Origin. Virgin Galactic has a backlog of more than 600 potential fliers, including SpaceX founder Elon Musk.
Moeller rates Galactic share Buy and has a $48 price target for the stock.
Write to Al Root at allen.root@dowjones.com
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