After getting its start in Seattle and testing its business model in France and Florida, a space travel venture called Orbite is ready to start signing up customers for private-sector astronaut training programs.
And although it’ll be a while before those programs begin in earnest, Orbite CEO Jason Andrews says the first 500 people to make a refundable deposit will be in for some astronaut-worthy experiences between now and then.
“What we are announcing today is just the beginning,” he said.
Orbite plans to invite early-stage customers in its Founders Club to attend a series of space-adjacent events, starting with a rocket-launch watch party in Florida next spring and continuing with gatherings that could include an underwater adventure in the Florida Keys and a trip to Antarctica.
Andrews said Founders Club members could spend part of their $5,000 pre-booking deposit on one of those tours, or put all the money toward a training program at Orbite’s Astronaut Training and Spaceflight Gateway Campus in Florida.
That training facility, mapped out by French industrial designer Phillippe Starck, is due to be built at a site that’s yet to be disclosed in the area around Florida’s Space Coast and Orlando. Protracted business negotiations led to delays in the development schedule, but the facility is currently set to open in 2026, Andrews said.
Orbite (pronounced “or-beet,” in the French way) was founded in 2019 by Andrews, the former CEO of Seattle-based Spaceflight Industries; and Nicolas Gaume, a French-born tech entrepreneur who also works at Microsoft.
The privately held company’s mission is to familiarize would-be spacefliers with the space marketplace — and to let them sample final-frontier experiences on Earth.
Orbite offered a series of three-day orientation sessions in 2021 to test out its concept, which blended zero-G and high-G airplane flights with classroom sessions and extracurricular activities such as stargazing and space-food tasting sessions.
With the aid of virtual-reality simulations, participants learned about the suborbital flights offered by Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture, as well as the orbital flights facilitated by Axiom Space and SpaceX.
“You get to try a Blue flight and a Virgin flight, and you also get to try a Dragon flight and a Starship flight,” Andrews said. “We’re working with the other providers today to integrate the stratospheric balloons and the on-orbit platforms, so that you walk out of day one very much more advanced than when you walked in.”
The lessons learned during past sessions are helping Orbite fine-tune its plans.
“We are working to design our curriculum and facilities to support the missions of tomorrow, which will include professional astronauts, mission specialists and career astronauts working in low Earth orbit, on the moon and potentially Mars,” Brienna Rommes, Orbite’s director of astronaut training, said in a news release.
Andrews told GeekWire that different levels of the curriculum will target different sectors of the spaceflight market.
“Think about this as a college campus, but a college campus for space, where you come in and do your 100-level courses to explore different topics,” he said. “You do your 200-level courses that start to get into the details. We think of that as the suborbital training curriculum. You do your 300-level courses, which is your orbital training curriculum. And then you can have your advanced courses … whether you’re going to space for enjoyment or you’re going there for your profession.”
Orbite’s four-night orientation course — the 100-level course — is priced at $29,500. Prices for the five-night suborbital training program start at $49,500 per person.
Orbite is also working out the details for orbital training programs — the 300-level courses. “The orbital flight training is more custom, depending on the mission (e.g., three days vs. one week or one month),” Andrews explained in an email. “As a result, there is not a fixed price, but it starts around $400,000 and can go up depending on the mission. It is still a small portion of the overall ticket price.”
Andrews said Orbite is planning to facilitate commercial space tours using a strategy that’s similar to how Spaceflight Industries’ subsidiary, Spaceflight Inc., facilitated satellite launches on other companies’ rockets. Just as Spaceflight Inc. was able to reserve a dedicated SpaceX Falcon 9 launch in 2018, Orbite could help its clients reserve spots with Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, SpaceX or other spaceflight providers.
“On one hand, we’ll train our clients, and we can recommend and be their third-party advisers on them purchasing their tickets, to go to one of these providers,” he said. “At the same time, what we saw at Spaceflight was that a lot of these operators want to focus on launching full rockets instead of herding cats.”
In that scenario, Orbite could take care of the cat-herding.
Andrews said managing the preparations for space trips is likely to become more complicated once SpaceX’s Starship super-rocket enters the picture. “Working with a dozen high-net-worth individuals to put together a Starship mission is a tremendous undertaking,” he said. “We think Orbite is ideally suited to do that, because we’re focused on customers and have the infrastructure to support them. And it saves the industry from duplicating that infrastructure.”
Orbite’s customer base may not be limited to spacefliers. “Really, it’s the adventure of a lifetime for the family, and so that’s how we think about it,” Andrews said. “It could be that one individual flies, but the family trains, and their friends come to experience that.”
What kind of niche will Orbite be able to carve out in a space transportation industry that’s still in its infancy? Andrews acknowledged that the venture has faced its share of challenges. But that’s the way it typically goes in the space business — and for that matter, in the startup world as well.
“Any entrepreneur starts out on a new adventure, especially when you’re building a new industry from the ground up,” he said.
“If I go back to the early days of Spaceflight, in 2009 and 2010, we had our missionary robes on, walking around the industry for two to three years before we signed our first contract. And it was years later before we launched our first flight,” Andrews recalled. “So, this is not uncommon when you’re trying to do something that’s never been done before. On one hand, do I wish we were farther forward? Yes. On the other hand, we’ve done a tremendous amount.”
