Would you be interested in a financing program that allows you to take your flight and pay it off throughout your life? No prepayment penalties.

The earlier you do it, the longer you can live life sharing your experience and viewing everything through its perspective, instead of just fly and die maybe a decade later or so.

This sounds like a monumentally terrible deal for the creditor. There's nothing securing that loan, if the debtor went bankrupt the creditor would lose all of it. If it was secured by something like the value of a home then that's just a regular reverse mortgage.

Even the initial price is not far from the credit card limits middle class people with good credit can obtain unsecured. Obviously the interest rate on that would be usurious, but Blue Origin has enough marginal profit margin (and cash) that it could conceivably finance the program at reasonable/zero interest with tolerable risk.

Just noodling about the economics, 7 passengers at $200K each is $1.4M gross revenue. So assuming very low earth orbit (basically you just need to be above enough of the atmosphere that you won't re-enter before the end of your first orbit) that is still a very low cost for a Falcon9 launch given that the second stage is not recovered. So you need to recover both stages operationally "close" to where they lifted off so that you minimize refurbishment/transport costs.

I'm guessing that would be that the second stage provides retropulsion to get you back to nominal zero velocity over the return point.

So that would be launch, booster returns to the pad, and the second stage pushes you up enough to insure an orbit, then your orient for return. Enjoy the view etc, and then the second stage relights to cancel your velocity to 0 as you arrive over the launch facility (you'll have to scoot 1000 miles or so east as well given planetary rotation) and then separate for a parachute landing of perhaps both the capsule and the second stage booster.

Sounds pretty complex. But you would have to recover all equipment if you wanted to have a chance as meeting the economics of that.

> Sounds pretty complex. But you would have to recover all equipment if you wanted to have a chance as meeting the economics of that.

All equipment, and especially the people in the equipment. One "safety incident" would crash the whole operation.

> Enjoy the view etc, and then the second stage relights to cancel your velocity to 0

That is not feasible. Your second stage would have to be roughly as large as an entire orbital rocket in order to slow itself down from orbital speeds to zero, which means your first stage would have to be massive in order to push the second stage into orbit.

The reason every vehicle that re-enters the atmosphere uses a heat shield is because it's way easier to carry a relatively light heat shield that sheds off the speed than to carry the massive amount of fuel to shed off the same speed.

See https://what-if.xkcd.com/58/

If instead of a circular orbit you just went for an arc with a really high apoapsis you could probably burn a little fuel to reduce the forward momentum to zero, and then proceed to slowly plummet back to earth... which then means you need a really big heat shield as that gravitational potential energy turns back into kinetic and you smack into the atmosphere at a ridiculous velocity. Scratch that, too much Kerbal.

a tall suborbital parabola that falls back into the atmosphere at an 85 degree angle is basically the same re-entry heat as if you were to do what you described, fly the parabola, and thrust retrograde at apoapsis to cancel out the downrange velocity, then fall into the atmosphere dead vertical.

It's horizontal velocity (actual LEO velocity) that causes the heating effects a Soyuz or Dragon type capsule needs to survive with heat shield on re-entry.

And for marginally more than the cost of a single orbit, you could stay up there for days or weeks.

You cannot save 100% of your pre-tax salary. That said, you make an interesting point

By the time your reach retirement age you should have saved enough to last you the rest of your life, so that effectively any additional income can be spent completely.

> You cannot save 100% of your pre-tax salary

Depends on the industry in which you earn your salary. Some are not above the board.

And where you work. I've had Dubai-based companies try to sell me on "work here, pay zero taxes". (I politely told him I cared more about human rights.)

Interesting. Which industries in particular?

Illegal ones