Blue Origin has partnered with others to build a private space station , which will accommodate 10 astronauts.
Jeff Bezos has revealed that his company, Blue Origin , plans to build and launch its own space station into orbit.
The station, called Orbital Reef, wants to start operating in 2025 and seeks to become a research center, but also a private tourism center.
To do this, Blue Origin is using the support of two important partners in the space sector.
The first is Sierra Nevada Corporation , a company that is working on a winged space plane that seeks to transport cargo and passengers to the International Space Station (ISS).
The second is Boeing , one of NASA’s allies and which has underway the construction of the Starliner, a capsule that won the tender to send space agency astronauts into orbit, but has not yet completed any flights with passengers.
What will the Orbital Reef look like?
The Orbital Reef design is very different from what we now know at ISS and Tiangong stations.
Blue Origin notes that it will be a “mixed-use business park” in space that will have multiple ports and berths for spacecraft and visitor modules, along with various services and amenities.
Not being focused solely on research, the station will allow entry to tourists, tech enthusiasts, and more.
“As the premier commercial low-Earth orbit destination, Orbital Reef will provide the essential infrastructure needed to scale economic activity and open new markets in space,” Blue Origin writes in a press release.
Although Blue Origin has the necessary funds for its construction, it will try to win a NASA tender called the Commercial Low Earth Orbit (LEO) Development Program or CLD , which seeks to government support for private companies to create their own stations. , but to which NASA can send its astronauts for its own research.
This agency plan is in line with the next ISS phase-out, which should only continue to operate until 2024. Its maintenance is expensive, with more than 3 or 4 billion dollars in repairs.
Right now, Blue Origin’s only operational spaceflight project is New Shepard, a suborbital tour rocket designed to send paying customers to the limit of space and vice versa. So far , the company has moved eight people into space at New Shepard, including Bezos.