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DeepSpace: Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin banter about the fine print of suborbital tourism

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8 years ago

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Welcome to the sixth edition of our new newsletter, DeepSpace! Each Tuesday, I’ll be taking a deep-dive into the most exciting developments in commercial space, from satellites and rockets to everything in between. If you’d like to receive DeepSpace and all of our newsletters and membership benefits, you can become a member for as little as $3/month here.

Just shy of two months into 2019, the new year has been marked by a distinct focus on human spaceflight. Most of that focus has centered (as it should) on the relatively imminent launch debut of both SpaceX’s Crew Dragon and Boeing’s Starliner, crewed spacecraft designed and built to carry astronauts into orbit for NASA.

However, beyond SpaceX and Boeing, a considerable amount of noise is being made about the labors and relative progress of companies like Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, both primarily focused on building a suborbital tourism market with their New Shepard and SpaceShipTwo launch vehicles. Coming as no surprise from companies aiming to create a sustainable market for a very expensive consumer product, both products have been dragged through a torturous maze of marketing hype in a process that has not really done the serious endeavor of human spaceflight any favors.

The Shepard and the Ship

  • Virgin Galactic’s launch vehicle provider The Spaceship Company has been working to develop a suborbital platform to launch humans since the early 2000s, incorporated after billionaire Paul Allen funded a group of companies that ultimately won the Ansari X Prize in 2004.
    • The Virgin/TSC approach involves a carrier aircraft (Known as White Knight Two) and a much smaller rocket plane (SpaceShipTwo) that is carried up to ~30,000 feet (9 km) before dropping and igniting its engine.
    • SpaceShipTwo is meant to reach a maximum altitude of around 300,000 feet (~90 km) at a top speed of roughly Mach 3 (1000 m/s, 2200 mph) before gliding back to land on the same runway.
    • In 2014, a combination of bad aeronautical design and pilot error triggered the in-flight failure of the first SpaceShipTwo, killing one of its two pilots. A member of the NTSB board that investigated the failure stated that Scale Composites (one of TSC’s parent companies) “put all their eggs in the basket of the pilots [flying the vehicle] correctly.”
    • In a February 2019 video, Virgin Galactic CEO George Whitesides noted that “many aircraft are moving to being less piloted over time [but] our vehicle really is piloted to space.”
    • SpaceShipTwo most recently launched on February 22nd.
  • Blue Origin has yet to launch an actual human on New Shepard, a small, reusable single-stage rocket designed to loft a separate passenger capsule to approximately 100 km (330,000 ft).
    • New Shepard has conducted ten launches since its 2015 debut, most of which saw the crew capsule and booster approximately reach that nominal 100 km apogee and nine of which concluded with a successful landing of the rocket’s booster.
    • Capable of carrying up to six passengers, the Crew Capsule features a built-in abort motor that has been successfully tested, as well as a parachute system for a relatively soft landing at end-of-mission.

“Spacecraft” and “astronauts”

  • Aside from the generally impressive technology itself and the undeniable challenges and risks of launch humans on fueled rockets, both Blue Origin’s New Shepard and Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo exist – albeit with different weights – to cater to a new market, suborbital or “space” tourism.
    • While NASA is taking advantage of the opportunities to test small experiments with both vehicles as a partial platform, the real goal of both vehicles is to routinely launch paying customers.
    • While Blue Origin has yet to announce ticket pricing, Virgin Galactic has priced their offering at $250,000 per person. In both cases, the end result will likely be a six-figure sum in return for an experience that should last no more than 10-60 minutes from start to finish, excluding buildup from screening and whatever training is deemed necessary.
    • In other words, short of cases involving charity, tickets on New Shepard and SpaceShipTwo will almost indefinitely be reserved for less than 1% of humanity, those with income around $1M or more per year. This is by no means a bad thing and is, in fact, a proven first or second step in the direction of democratizing exotic or expensive technologies like air travel, computers, and even electric cars (namely Teslas).
  • However, both companies are laser-focused on branding their vehicles as spacecraft and their passengers as astronauts, with Virgin Galactic being the worst offender in this regard.
    • Aside from literally calling its 600+ prospective customers “Future Astronauts”, Virgin Galactic uses every chance it gets to hammer home its claim that SpaceShipTwo is a commercial spacecraft and its pilots true licensed, “wing”-ed astronauts.
    • While passengers are not eligible for official FAA ‘astronauts’ wings’, it appears that Virgin will continue to market its passenger experience as one where customers will get to ‘travel to space’ and more or less become astronauts.
    • Blue Origin describes its commercial offering as a “reusable suborbital rocket system designed to take astronauts and research payloads past the Kármán line – the internationally recognized boundary of space.”
    • Both Blue and Virgin flights offer about ~4 minutes of weighlessness between launch and landing.

    •  

    • For context, Alan Shepard – the US test pilot and namesake of New Shepard – was launched to an altitude of almost 190 km (120 mi) for what was recognized as the first US “spaceflight” and spent something like 5-10 minutes in microgravity and above the Karman Line (100 km).
    • Used as a rough measure for a sort of fixed, arbitrary boundary between “Earth” and “Space”, reasonable arguments have been made in the last few years that the 100 km Karman Line could more accurately be placed around 70-90 km, in which case Virgin Galactic might actually be technically correct when saying that SpaceShipTwo and its passengers are traveling to space.
      • Fewer than 570 humans in all of history have visited space (> 100 km), around 99.5% of which were astronauts that reached orbit. To call pilots of a spaceplane as distinctly suborbital as SpaceShipOne “astronauts” is palatable, particularly given the risks they face as test subjects and test pilots.
      • However, to even hinting that tourists riding New Shepard or SpaceShipTwo to altitudes of ~80-100 kilometers are astronauts would do an immense disservice to those that pushed the limits of technology, risked their lives, or even died in pursuit of orbital spaceflight, the only kind of spaceflight with any significant utility.
    • Much like cruise ship customers are not under the impression that they are coming along to ‘become sailors’, suborbital tourists are not astronauts. That being said, it’s not inaccurate to describe the experience they will have the privilege of being part of as something truly extraordinary, given that they will become one of a very select few humans to have actually launched on a rocket or seen the exaggerated curvature of Earth’s limb against the blackness of space.

    Mission Updates 

    • SpaceX’s first attempted orbital launch of Crew Dragon – a spacecraft designed to transport astronauts to and from the International Space Station – is set to occur as early as 2:49 am EST/07:49 UTC on March 2nd.
      • This is the first truly serious date, thanks to the successful completion of a critical pre-launch review conducted by NASA and SpaceX.
    • The second launch of Falcon Heavy could occur as early as late March
    • Aside from DM-1 and Falcon Heavy Flight 2, it’s unclear what SpaceX mission will happen next, although a West Coast launch (the Radarsat Constellation Mission) is a strong candidate.

    Photos of the Week:

    After successfully sending the world’s first commercial lunar lander on its way to the Moon and placing Indonesian communications satellite PSN-6 in a high-energy Earth orbit, Falcon 9 B1048 completed its third launch and landing and returned to port on February 24th. The booster’s fourth mission, a Crew Dragon in-flight abort test, will likely destroy B1048, making this its last successful recovery. (c. Tom Cross)

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Eric Ralph is Teslarati's senior spaceflight reporter and has been covering the industry in some capacity for almost half a decade, largely spurred in 2016 by a trip to Mexico to watch Elon Musk reveal SpaceX's plans for Mars in person. Aside from spreading interest and excitement about spaceflight far and wide, his primary goal is to cover humanity's ongoing efforts to expand beyond Earth to the Moon, Mars, and elsewhere.

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Elon Musk

Elon Musk shuts down talk of TSMC taking over Terafab

Musk says Tesla and SpaceX will build and run Terafab, with TSMC limited to renting.

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5 hours ago

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October 7, 2026

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SpaceX Terafab rendering

Elon Musk has drawn a firm line around who will be in charge of Terafab, the giant chip factory Tesla and SpaceX are planning in Texas.

Musk replied to a post on X arguing that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) would most likely end up owning and operating the plant. “No, we will build and run the fab. Let there be ZERO doubt about that,” Musk wrote. “Maybe TSMC subleases part of the Terafab if they want, but nothing more than that.”

In plain terms, a sublease means TSMC could rent a section of the complex to make chips, similar to a tenant renting one floor of an office tower. The building, the equipment decisions and the daily operation would stay with Tesla and SpaceX.

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The comment shuts down speculation that started last week. On October 2, tech journalist Tim Culpan reported that TSMC was exploring ways to help run Terafab’s factories. Musk responded the next day that it was “just discussions, but something may come of it,” as Teslarati reported at the time. That left room for a scenario where the world’s largest contract chipmaker took the wheel. Musk’s latest post closes that door.

Elon Musk teases TSMC as potential Terafab partner

Some background helps explain why this matters. Tesla designs its own AI chips today but pays outside companies like TSMC and Samsung to manufacture them. Musk unveiled Terafab in March as a joint project between Tesla, SpaceX and xAI, arguing that existing suppliers cannot expand fast enough to meet his companies’ future demand. The goal is to produce enough chips each year to supply one terawatt of computing power, roughly 50 times what the entire global AI chip industry produces now.

Those chips are meant for Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robots, the Cybercab and Full Self-Driving computers, along with chips for SpaceX’s planned data centers in orbit. Owning the factory means Musk’s companies would not have to compete with every other chip customer for time on someone else’s production lines.

Intel is still part of the picture. The company signed on in April to help design, build and package chips for the project, and CEO Lip-Bu Tan told Bloomberg this week that Intel will keep working on Terafab despite the TSMC chatter.

The project moved from concept to construction planning over the summer. In August, SpaceX confirmed the Grimes County site about an hour from Houston, sent the county a $10 million payment under its tax abatement deal and said civil work would begin shortly. The first phase carries a $16.8 billion price tag, and total spending across all phases could reach as much as $119 billion.

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TSMC chairman C.C. Wei has said a new fab typically takes two to three years to build and another one to two years to reach full output. Tesla and SpaceX have never run one, which is why TSMC’s expertise drew so much attention. Musk’s answer suggests he would rather learn that process in house than hand control of a project this central to Tesla’s robotics and autonomy plans to an outside company.

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Elon Musk

Trump to hand Elon Musk a top honor that traces back to JFK

Trump will award Elon Musk the National Medal of Science at Thursday’s White House summit.

Published

12 hours ago

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October 7, 2026

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elon musk and donald trump in front of a tesla cybertruck at the white house

Elon Musk is set to receive the highest honor the U.S. government gives to scientists and engineers.

President Donald Trump will present Musk with the National Medal of Science on Thursday at the White House’s Science: A New Golden Age Summit, Fox News Digital first reported on Wednesday. Google cofounder Sergey Brin, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and AMD CEO Lisa Su will receive the same medal, while Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella will receive the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. A White House official later confirmed the list to Reuters.

“The Trump administration is grateful for the contributions of these incredible leaders in science and technology. These recipients are helping ensure America keeps leading the world in innovation,” White House spokesperson Liz Huston told Fox News.

It will be the first time Trump has presented either medal in his two terms. Congress created the National Medal of Science in 1959, and the National Science Foundation, which administers it, says 529 scientists and engineers have received it since. A presidential committee reviews nominees, but the president makes the final call.

Thursday’s group of medalists run or founded companies, and three of them sit at the center of the Super Intelligence hardware race that Musk competes in. Huang’s Nvidia supplies the GB300 chips filling SpaceX’s Colossus 2 cluster, while Su’s AMD is Nvidia’s biggest rival in data center GPUs.

Worth noting that Trump’s uncle, MIT physicist John G. Trump, received the National Medal of Science from President Ronald Reagan for his work on ionizing radiation and its uses in medicine and industry.

The Pentagon taps Elon Musk to design the battlefield of the future

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For Musk, the medal is the latest sign of how far his relationship with Trump has come since their 2025 split over the “Big Beautiful Bill” and his exit from DOGE. Last week, he sat at Trump’s left during a White House lunch where AI executives signed a voluntary safety accord, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth named him to help lead the Pentagon’s Project Meridian study on the future of warfare. Musk has also adopted the administration’s new vocabulary, saying on Sunday that SpaceXAI will be renamed SpaceXSI after Trump ordered federal agencies to replace “artificial intelligence” with “super intelligence.”

Musk has collected science honors before, including the Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication in 2019.

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Lifestyle

Tesla FSD changed its mind mid-intersection, and it may have saved a life

Tesla shares dashcam footage of FSD Supervised stopping mid intersection to avoid a T-bone crash.

Published

17 hours ago

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October 7, 2026

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Credit: @BLKMDL3/X

Tesla is putting another Full Self-Driving save in front of its 24.8 million followers on X.

On Tuesday morning, Tesla’s main account shared a dashcam clip with the caption “FSD Supervised preventing T-bone crash.” The footage came from an owner posting as TheNewGrid, who described what happened at a stop sign: “I looked at the car coming to the stop sign figured they would stop, my car went, then came to a stop mid intersection as they flew by. Had I been manually driving this would have resulted in a crash.”

The sequence is the notable part. FSD had already started crossing when the other driver ran the stop sign. Instead of pressing on, the car braked hard in the middle of the intersection and let the crossing vehicle pass in front of it. By the owner’s own account, they had made the same assumption the software initially made, that the other car would stop, and would not have corrected in time.

The clip is the latest in a run of safety posts Tesla has amplified over the past several days. On Saturday, the company shared a video from Selling Sunset star Jason Oppenheim, who sold his Bentley for a Model Y and said he was buying Teslas with FSD for 10 of his employees. Ashok Elluswamy, who leads Tesla AI, followed up by writing that Tesla self-driving “reacts to other people cutting into your path with super-human response times.” On Monday, a Cybertruck owner posted footage of FSD moving across three lanes from a red light to clear a path for an ambulance approaching from behind.

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This recent clip also lands a few weeks after Tesla began shipping Automatic Collision Evasion with FSD v14.3.9, a feature that can activate FSD on the driver’s behalf when a frontal collision is imminent or the driver appears distracted. Elluswamy said in September that “even earlier prediction of hazards, even faster reaction time and overall significantly better safety and collision avoidance” are coming with v15, the release Tesla has tied to round the clock Robotaxi operation.

The safety messaging matters beyond social media. Tesla has said FSD Supervised was 4.1 times less likely to crash than manual driving across 100 million kilometers on European roads, and it has been putting those figures in front of regulators. Eight EU countries have now approved FSD Supervised, with Croatia the most recent, but the EU’s bloc-wide vote originally set for October 6 has been pushed to December at the earliest.

FSD Supervised is still a Level 2 system, and the driver remains responsible at all times. Even heavy users find reasons to step in. Teslarati’s Joey Klender, who uses FSD for about 76 percent of his driving, laid out five recurring issues on Tuesday that still prompt him to intervene. Clips like this one show the other column of that ledger: moments where the software caught a mistake a human was about to make.

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