Blue Origin releases first interior photos of the capsule that will take tourists to space

Private spaceflight company Blue Origin has released the first interior photos for the New Shepard, offering a glimpse at what the finished crew capsule will look like.

New Shepard is a reusable vehicle aimed at taking tourists to the edge of space, where they can float around weightless for a few minutes. The rocket has been successfully launched and landed five times already, but no people have ridden in the capsule yet. Blue Origin is planning to take its first paying customers to space by 2018, according to CEO Jeff Bezos.

The photos of New Shepard look quite different from the interior of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule. But while the New Shepard focuses on tourism, the main purpose for Crew Dragon is to send astronauts to the International Space Station. (Though CEO Elon Musk recently announced that he plans to send two tourists around the moon in the spaceship in 2018.)

“Every seat’s a window seat, the largest windows ever in space,” Bezos wrote in an email update about the New Shepard. The photos show reclining black seats with blue piping, and seats emblazoned with the Blue Origin feather logo, chosen because it is “a symbol of flight with grace and power.”

Reporters will be able to see a mockup of the capsule at the 33rd Space Symposium in Colorado Springs from April 3rd to 6th. Check out the images of the New Shepard crew capsule below.