Travel To Space: Tourists Capsule Photos Revealed By Blue Origin For First Time

Rocket company Blue Origin unveiled the first ever images of its capsule designed to take tourists on a trip into space Wednesday. The sneak peak included illustrations of the sleek white New Shepard Capsule complete with black leather seats and large windows that will look out on Earth.

“Every seat’s a window seat,” the email releasing the photos said. “The largest windows ever in space.”

Read: Watch Blue Origin Successfully Launch New Shepard Rocket

The privately funded spaceflight company, launched by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has said that it would like to turn tourists into unofficial astronauts sometime in 2018. The New Shepard capsule would bring the travelers to the edge of space before returning them home.

“Our New Shepard flight test program is focused on demonstrating the performance and robustness of the system,” the email said. “In parallel, we’ve been designing the capsule interior with an eye toward precision engineering, safety and comfort.”

The inside of the capsule measures 530 square feet, more than 10 times the space astronaut Alan Shepard during his 1961 mission, according to the company. The windows are constructed of multiple layers of fracture-tough transparencies, designed in order to provide the best view from inside the craft.

Bezos, by way of Blue Origin, aims to popularize space travel for the general population and “to seed an enduring human presence in space, to help us move beyond this blue planet that is the origin of all we know.” The company has built upon a number of rocket launches in an attempt to create groundbreaking spaceflight systems.

Blue Origin’s plans for private spaceflight are mirrored closely by those of Elon Musk, the founder of private space venture SpaceX, which intends for people to live on other planets. Musk has also voiced his intentions to send humans to space, though his company hasn’t yet released any photographs of its tourism crafts.

A prototype of the capsule will be displayed at the 33rd Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colorado, from April 3 through April 6 alongside a reusable booster from New Shepard, which made it to space five times before being retired.