TechCrunch Newsletters - Max Q - The $28 million question

The big question on everyone’s mind in space land is who the big spender is that put up $28 million to book a ride on Blue Origin’s first ever human spaceflight launch. It’s a lot of money, especially for something that should cost south of $1 million at average market rates after this first trip.

Blue Origin's biggest bidder

So Blue Origin hosted a live online auction over the weekend as mentioned, and while bidding stood at $4.8 million before the run-off, it jumped up considerably to a closing best of $28 million. What the winner gets for that is a few minutes at the lower edge of space, on a suborbital launch of the company’s reusable New Shepard spacecraft.

A bonus for this mission alone is a chance to ride along with Mr. BO himself, Jeff Bezos, who is taking up one of the other seats on this flight, along with his brother Mark who will occupy a third. There’s also a fourth, yet-to-be-named passenger who will join the deep-pocketed auction winner. Blue Origin says it’ll reveal the identities of both of those latter private astronauts in the coming weeks as it milks every possible ounce of public attention out of the July 20 launch.

Everyone’s favorite pick for the mystery bidder is obviously Elon Musk, since that would be hilarious and the SpaceX founder has already traded quite a few jabs with Bezos over Blue Origin’s space program thus far, but now Bezos has an upper hand for once since he’s on track to beat Musk to space personally. Meanwhile, those of us who aren’t billionaires are looking forward to just being able to get on a plane again without it being weird.

Speaking of private astronauts...

NASA just issued a new request for proposals for private astronaut missions to the International Space Station, tentatively scheduled sometime in the next couple of years. This is part of ongoing efforts by the agency to effectively make space happen, in the sense of it being a place where commercial activity occurs more frequently.

NASA is already working with Axiom Space on a number of private astronaut visits to the ISS, facilitated by SpaceX and its Crew Dragon spacecraft. One of the reasons it wants this to work so badly is so that when it’s time for the ISS to end its mission, NASA doesn’t have to get approval for a massive spend to send up another publicly funded space station, and instead can be one of many customers of a future private orbital space facility run by a commercial entity. Axiom is one of the frontrunners looking to build such a facility, too.

Relativity boost its cash for big rocket

3D printing rocket maker Relativity has added another significant round of funding, this time totalling $650 million and bringing its valuation to $4.2 billion overall. That probably seems like a lot given that it last raised $500 million in November 2020, but it costs a lot of money to create entirely new rockets, and an entirely new production process to make those at scale.

The timing is also right for Relativity to add on a bunch more capital: It’s setting out on the process of building an entirely new spacecraft, before even launching its first to orbit. The Terran R that the company is developing is a heavy-lift rocket that will be fully reusable, including a fairing that will remain attached to the rocket’s second stage and return to Earth, which is a pretty nifty trick.

Another launch startup with a very different approach — Astra — will be acquiring an in-space propulsion startup called Apollo Fusion. Electric propulsion for maneuvering in space is very popular, and Apollo Fusion is far from the only company working on this, but the acquisition by Astra is notable because it represents another part of the company’s strategy of providing its customers with everything they need to get their payload into space — including the satellites to carry them there.

Join us at TC Sessions: Space in December

Last year we held our first dedicated space event, and it went so well that we decided to host it again in 2021. This year, it’s happening December 14 and 15, and it’s once again going to be an entirely virtual conference, so people from all over the world will be able to join — and you can, too.

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