According to a media report, Blue Origin plans to double the number of passengers it flew to space in its first year of operations, a goal that can be achieved "simply" by bringing in a second rocket.

So far, 14 passengers have been taken to space by the space tourism firm in three missions in July, October, and December. According to SpaceNews, Blue Origin will need to bring another New Shepard spacecraft on board and reduce the turnaround time between missions to meet the new flight rate.

During a presentation at the 24th Annual FAA Commercial Space Transportation Conference on Thursday, Bob Smith, CEO of Blue Origin, stated of the space tourism business, "The market is robust. It's very robust" (Feb. 17). SpaceNews reported on the presentation.

"The challenge for Blue at this point is that we're actually supply-limited. No business ever wants to be supply-limited when there's robust demand," Smith said. "It's incumbent on us to go build new vehicles, get them ready and safely go fly, and also safely get our launch cadence up."

While Blue Origin has yet to reveal its operational per-seat pricing or the number of passengers in line, it has provided market forecasts based on the $28 million that Chinese cryptocurrency entrepreneur Justin Sun successfully bid for a seat on the first crewed flight of New Shepard in July. (Lin was unable to attend the first meeting, but hopes to travel in the fourth quarter of 2022.)

Blue Origin informed SpaceNews that the auction gave the space tourism firm an idea of how their wealthy customer base values the worth of a journey to space.

“We've learned a lot of interesting things about the market over the past year," said Audrey Powers, vice-president of New Shepard flight and mission operations at Blue Origin who also flew on New Shepard in October.

The New Shepard spacecraft has a seating capacity of six people, yet just one launch (in December) has gone off with all six seats full. Smith declined to say how many crewed or uncrewed New Shepard flights will fly in 2022, but did say that all crewed trips will transport a maximum of six people.

Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin's major competitor, has now resumed seat sales for $450,000 each; their missions have been postponed until later this year due to maintenance and upgrade work on the VSS Unity spacecraft's carrier plane, VMS Eve.

By the time commercial service is slated to begin in 2022, Virgin aims to have 1,000 customers on its waiting list, up from 700 in November 2021. The business is also working on the second of its space planes, which will each be capable of transporting up to six tourists and two professional pilots.