A mock up of the Blue Origin capsule, famed windows and all.

Blue Origin wants to make sure you know about its windows.

The company, owned by multi-billionaire and now former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, intends to send rich tourists to space and is not at all like Virgin Galactic — a company founded by billionaire Richard Branson which plans to eventually send rich tourists to space.

That’s the message made loud and clear by Blue Origin in a series of tweets Friday which attempt to draw a distinction between the two companies. Specifically, Blue Origin highlighted all the ways its offering is presumably superior.

Notably, those include the following:

  1. Blue Origin’s New Shepard capsule is perched atop a rocket, while Virgin Galactic offers a ride in some kind of space plane.

  2. The Blue Origin capsule takes tourists to approximately 100 kilometers of elevation, while Virgin Galactic’s plane reportedly reaches heights of around 80 kilometers. According to National Geographic, NASA, the Federal Aviation Administration, the U.S. Air Force, and NOAA, space technically starts at around the 80 kilometer mark.

  3. And, perhaps most importantly of all, Blue Origin’s New Shepard capsule has the “largest windows in space.”

While admittedly having large windows on a space tourism ride does sound nice, it’s unclear if the view offered by Virgin Galactic will be inferior.

Virgin Galactic is set to take off on July 11, with Blue Origin’s New Capsule is timed to depart on July 20.

It is true, to be fair, that the methods of conveyance offered by Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic are quite different. Take a look.



Virgin Galactic's SpaceshipTwo on a test flight in 2018.

Virgin Galactic’s SpaceshipTwo on a test flight in 2018.
Credit: GENE BLEVINS / getty

Jeff Bezos, chief executive officer of Amazon.com Inc. and founder of Blue Origin LLC, speaks at the unveiling of the Blue Origin New Shepard system during the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colorado, U.S., on Wednesday, April 5, 2017. Bezos has been reinvesting money he made at Amazon since he started his space exploration company more than a decade ago, and has plans to launch paying tourists into space within two years. Photographer: Matthew Staver/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Jeff Bezos, chief executive officer of Amazon.com Inc. and founder of Blue Origin LLC, speaks at the unveiling of the Blue Origin New Shepard system during the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colorado, U.S., on Wednesday, April 5, 2017. Bezos has been reinvesting money he made at Amazon since he started his space exploration company more than a decade ago, and has plans to launch paying tourists into space within two years. Photographer: Matthew Staver/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Credit: Bloomberg via Getty Images

But as long as they both get paying tourists to space and safely back home again, it’ll be up to those forking over the (huge amounts of) cash to decide if one is inherently better than the other.

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