Nine days after billionaire Richard Branson made history by becoming the first person to launch himself into space on his own Virgin Galactic plane, fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos did the same on a rocket from his company Blue Origin.
“Best day ever,” Bezos said from the autonomous capsule after it landed.
The 57-year-old Amazon founder stepped into the “New Shepard” rocket in West Texas on Tuesday, July 20th – a date specifically chosen because it celebrated the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. The flight lasted just over 10 minutes, with the crew experiencing a few minutes of weightlessness before returning safely to earth.
The name of the rocket itself has historical significance. According to the Blue Origin website, “Named after Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard, the first American to go to space, New Shepard is our reusable suborbital rocket system designed to take astronauts and research payloads past the Kármán line – the internationally recognized boundary of space.”
The suborbital flight included the youngest (Daemen), oldest (Funk) and richest (Bezos) people ever to reach space. Bezos was joined by his younger brother, Mark; Mary Wallace “Wally” Funk, an 82-year-old female aviation pioneer, who due to her sex, was never allowed to become an astronaut in her time; and Oliver Daemen, 18, the son of the chief executive of a private equity investment firm and one of the runners-up in a $28 million charitable auction for the mission’s final seat. (The actual winner, who remains anonymous for now, had a “scheduling conflict” and will go on a later flight.)
As the rocket was designed to do, the passengers climbed to an altitude of 351,210 feet, past the so-called Kármán line which is recognized by some international aviation and aerospace experts as the threshold of space. Family members greeted the crew on the ground after they stepped out of the capsule for a champagne toast at about 8:30 a.m. local time.
It was the first launch with passengers for Blue Origin, which — like Branson’s Virgin Galactic and Elon Musk’s SpaceX — plans to start flying paying customers in the months ahead. “We are open for ticket sales to send all of you to space,” Ariane Cornell, Blue Origin’s sales director, told viewers watching the livestream of the company’s historic launch.
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