You also need to get to a high TRL for confidence from contractors. People are more willing to take risks than someone sending up $100m+ satellites or vehicles. Those successful human missions get you to a TRL 9 pretty quickly.
But many of these companies have much bigger aims than tourism. Tourism is part of it, but more like orbital hotels, lunar hotels, etc. Not a short trip. But also mining. There's A LOT of money in mining once the vehicles get cheap enough. Which they aren't if you're flying a few times a year (like how most things come down in price when you manufacture at scale).
Nit pick: The point of the ride isn't to get 0 gravity. IT IS TO GO TO SPACE! That has a value much higher than that 5k 0g rides. Sure, 0g is part of it, but that's not why ANYONE is buying a ticket.
This is an incredibly important and underrated point. People aren't going (just) for the roller coaster ride. They're chasing the overview effect, the perspective-altering thrill of seeing the Earth from space.
I suspect a lot of people will pay handsomely for it. If they do (and it works despite the trip's brevity), prices will steadily drop as design and build costs get amortized away to nothing. Eventually it could be accessible to the majority of people (in developed countries), at least at a level where if you saved up you could get to space once in your lifetime — a sort of secular pilgrimage for the 21st century.
Given the apparent change in the worldviews of those who experience this effect, if we're lucky it might even help make the world a little bit better.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_effect
https://www.overviewinstituteaustralia.org/the-overview-effe...
Even if the hit rate is low, that doesn't necessarily deter thrill-seekers. 4,800 people have successfully climbed Mt. Everest (8,300 times[0]) at the cost of tens of thousands of dollars ($45k-70k[1], $11k for the royalty alone[2]), and the very real risk of death (375 deaths). The success rate is about half,[3] up from under 30% before 2006.[4]
[0] http://www.alanarnette.com/blog/2017/12/17/everest-by-the-nu...
[1] https://www.alpineascents.com/climbs/mount-everest/price-sch...
[2] Down from $25k before 2014 https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/02/140219-moun...
[3] https://www.quora.com/How-many-people-attempt-to-climb-Mt-Ev...
[4] https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/everest-by-the-numbers/in...
It's too bad the average scientist, especially astronomers, astrophysicists won't be able to afford to ride the ride?
(I'm not suspose to bring up the wealth divide in America, but it's been just so---what's the word--obvious. I'm at the point where I'm thinking about the future. A future where companies will just cater to the small percentage of the population with the biggest wad? Yea--I'm envious. )
By the way, your account has been dead for a very long time. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14766847
Yeah, not to mention that this is actually an impossible goal. And if it's the weightlessness sensation you are after, just get a new vomit comet. You need an airplane for that, not a rocket.
> IT IS TO GO TO SPACE!
Yeah, you need a rocket for that. A very small one. Oh, you mean to stay in space? Yeah, now you need a pretty big one.
> a dozen or two launches to gain experience and knowledge to pump back into the New Glen project
then it's probably cheaper to never fly a tourist. It's not great if the revenue from tourists is smaller than the opportunity cost of making the thing safe for tourists.
This is can in the long run give them an advantage over SpaceX depending on how fast SpaceX can actually shift towards manned launches.
Once New Glen starts launching in 2020, they want to quickly move past human certification, so practicing with New Shepard is less costly in terms of critical-path length and probably financially too-- bigger rocket, bigger spend per test.