[pie420]

The economics are just silly. 4 passengers at $250k each is only $1M in revenue per flight. Between fuel costs, rocket costs (even assuming 10x reuses per rocket, you'd need to build the rocket for significantly under $10M to have a chance at profitability, could you imagine building a rocket for under 10M?), engineer and employee salaries and benefits, advertising, liability, etc.

Add in the fact that you have a very viable competitor in Virgin Galactic and SpaceX who could leapfrog both and provide even better experiences, and I don't see how Blue Origin will ever be viable without government funding

[meepmorp]

I think BO's game plan has been to become something along the lines of a traditional aerospace contractor, and SpaceX has made that very hard.

I think the timing of the launch isn't coincidental - iirc, the investigation into the HLS decision is going to be done in early August, and it undoubtedly looks better for BO's case to have had a successful launch with humans onboard one of their rockets.

[dcow]

I suspect their end goal is other funding whilst using the consumer space to launch their program and establish credibility.