It’s rare that Jeff Bezos speaks about his suborbital RLV startup, Blue Origin, adding to the secretive environment that surrounds the company. So it was a bit of a surprise to see the topic come up in an InformationWeeb interview with Bezos. He doesn’t say much about Blue Origin, and there are no real insights here, but at least he talks about it:

InformationWeek: I understand you’re also involved in a space startup, Blue Origin. Is there any reason beyond that fact that space exploration is just a great dream to have?

Bezos: I’m just now trying to think about how we could open up Blue Origin as a Web service. It’s not immediately clear to me. (Laughs) But if we can figure it out, we will.

InformationWeek: What’s in space for you?

Bezos: This is a childhood passion of mine. It’s a very talent team of people working on building a vertical takeoff, vertical landing, suborbital vehicle. It’s a separate company and they’re doing a fantastic job and I’m very proud of them.

CNET News.com, whose readers generally know John Carmack as the creator of the computer games Doom and Quake, interviews the Armadillo Aerospace founder about his space venture. Carmack talks about Armadillo’s participation in last month’s X Prize Cup, his idea for “vertical drag racing”, and future plans, with an eye in particular for going after the suborbital space tourism market.

There are a number of interesting comments by Carmack in the interview. He suggests that it’s possible Armadillo might one day work with Virgin:

But we think the first really significant business opportunity is with the suborbital space tourism market, taking people up to 100 kilometers on a rocket. Virgin Galactic has really proved that that market exists by taking in over $20 million of hard-cash deposits. But it is worth noting that they do not have any kind of an exclusive arrangement with Burt Rutan’s development company and that if somebody else comes up with a vehicle (with) worthwhile capability, they’ll be more than happy to work with other companies. So it’s not out of the question that we might wind up flying some of the Virgin passengers at some point.

He also believes that Scaled Composites’ SS1 and SS2 designs, while technically effective, may not be economical if ticket prices drop:

We have some idea of their expenses per flight, based on their engine technology and their operational cost. And they could certainly turn a pretty good profit at $200,000 per passenger, but it’s not likely that they could turn a good profit if the price pressure pushes it down to $50,000 or lower.

Carmack says that he’s “from the camp that says that spaceships really shouldn’t look very much like airplanes” and that the ideal rocket “looks like a flying fuel tank”, talking about some concepts for a simple suborbital vehicle he has in mind. And as for his vision for the future of space tourism:

I think that you’ll get at least 500 people that will pay the $200,000. And then I think the price will start to steadily go down when you get two vendors out there. They’ll start undercutting each other, but the early generation of ships won’t go down much below $100,000. (When the industry) builds a more cost-effective vehicle, it will start coming down more, and eventually, maybe 10 years from now, it will be a $10,000 ride located someplace like a quick ride from Vegas, where people can just go and do their mad-money thing, dropping $10,000 on a ride.

The cost of a ticket on a Soyuz taxi mission to the ISS will go up $1 million to $21 million, the head of RSC Energia said Thursday. Nikolai Sevastyanov blamed “growth in the cost of materials and components used in the construction of the Soyuz spacecraft” for the cost increase. If this sounds vaguely familiar, it should: last month Roskosmos said that Soyuz ticket prices in general would be going up to $21.8 million because of increased costs. That report said that what tourists would pay is negotiated individually and “considered a commercial secret”; someone apparently forgot to tell this to Sevastyanov.