## 5 Structure
[PERSON] also started Virgin Orbit (U.S.) as a spin-off of Virgin Galactic (U.S.), focusing on small satellite launches using LauncherOne as a launch vehicle. LauncherOne was designed to deliver 300 kg of payload to LEO. It conducted six launches between 2020 and 2023, achieving four successful missions while experiencing two failures. Following a second unsuccessful attempt and facing financial difficulties, Virgin Orbit went bankrupt in 2023 [73; 74]. In the meantime, [PERSON], the founder of Amazon, founded the space technology company Blue Origin in 2000. Initially operating quietly with [PERSON]'s private funding, Blue Origin gained recognition in April 2015 with New Shepard's first successful uncrewed launch and landing. In 2021, [PERSON] himself flew aboard the rocket on its first crewed flight past the Karman line. New Shepard is a fully reusable, suborbital rocket designed mainly for space tourism. It carries up to six passengers or cargo beyond the Karman line, offering a few minutes of weightlessness before returning to Earth and the possibility to conduct experiments due to the cargo option. The vehicle comprises a crew capsule and a booster that lands vertically after launch. The capsule descends with parachutes and a rocket engine. New Shepard has flown 30 times, with 10 crewed missions earning more than $100 million from space tourism [70; 71; 75; 76]. The next major success was reached in 2023 when Blue Origin supplied its first BE-4 rocket engine to United Launch Alliance for the Vulcan Centaur rocket. On 16 January 2025, the company successfully achieved orbit with the inaugural launch of its New Glenn heavy-lift rocket (45 tons to LEO) [77].  
While the space tourism offered by Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin still remains hardly a curiosity or a very small niche of the space economy at best (one could find that USD 100 mln from space tourism from 10 crewed missions is a small amount compared to the USD 300-400 bln space economy), the reusability possibility proved, firstly, by New Shepard was a true milestone. However, this functionality in the case of orbital rockets was fully leveraged by Blue Origin's competitor, SpaceX (New Glenn conducted only one flight up to now, and its first stage, designed as reusable, was lost on descent). Until now, [PERSON]'s SpaceX is the only company in the New Space segment that truly revolutionized the launch industry. As a result, it also revolutionized the whole space economy by widely opening the doors to orbit due to its focus on reducing launch costs. Despite the three failed launch attempts, the Falcon 1 rocket finally reached orbit successfully in 2008, making SpaceX the first privately funded company to achieve this feat. This success broke the monopoly of state-backed launchers. It proved that private companies could develop and operate orbital launch systems from scratch, paving the way for cost reduction, reusability, and democratizing access to space [78; 79; 80].  
The cost of launching payloads was one of the primary barriers to space economy expansion. The model of expendable rockets, where each launch required a new vehicle to be built from scratch, made spaceflight prohibitively costly. The Space Shuttle program challenged this model. After winning the Moon race, \"NASA was tasked with making space access routine and affordable\" and planned to achieve it thanks to \"a reusable space plane that would launch into low orbit with the help of single-use rocket boosters and then reenter Earth's atmosphere and land on a runway\" [38] (pp. 21-22). The reusability was seen as the key to keeping costs down. In practice, however, their performance was far from this assumption. The cost of launching cargo was USD 90,000 (in today's real value) per kilogram. From the first to the last start, the shuttle program cost accounted for $290 billion (in real today value), consuming nearly a third of the whole NASA budget over that span, namely 1981-2011 [38] (pp. 23-24).