Can Amazon strategy help Blue Origin top SpaceX?

Subject :S&T

Section :Space Tech

Context:

An Amazon veteran tapped by Jeff Bezos to lead Blue Origin aims to pull from the ecommerce giant’s speedy manufacturing playbook to give the space company’s rocket launch and moon lander business a badly needed boost against Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

Space Tourism

Space tourism is about humans travelling into space for recreational purposes. It seeks to give laypeople the ability to go to space for recreational, leisure or business purposes.
It will make space more accessible to those individuals who are not astronauts and want to go to space for non-scientific purposes.
Three private companies – Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic and SpaceX are now spearheading the human endeavour to explore space.
Their progress will decide whether space travel will one day become as accessible as air travel.

Previous Space Tourists:

The first space tourist was US millionaire Dennis Tito, who in 2001 paid USD 20 million to hitch a ride on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft to visit the international space station and spent eight days there.
After Tito, there were only seven other private citizens who travelled to space until 2009 when the Russian space agency wound up the business of selling tickets to private citizens.
Space Adventures is the only private company to send paying customers to orbital space so far. In 2004, test pilot Mike Melville became the first private astronaut to fly beyond the Karman Line.

Significance:

Huge Market: There is an estimated market of 2.4 million people for such flights.

Base for Testing: It can provide a base for testing supersonic travel between different destinations on earth, significantly compressing travel time. Besides, it heralds the entry of the private sector into this arena.