Bezos prepares for first Blue Origin space flight
Billionaire American businessman Jeff Bezos and his three crewmates are engaging in a crash course of training on Sunday in preparation for his company Blue Origin’s inaugural flight to the edge of space planned for Tuesday. The suborbital launch from a site in the high desert plains of West Texas marks a crucial test for Blue Origin’s New Shepard spacecraft, a 60-foot-tall and fully autonomous rocket-andcapsule combo that is central to plans by Bezos to tap a potentially lucrative space tourism market. The planned 11-minute trip from the company’s Launch Site One facility is set to include the oldest person ever to go to space -- 82-year-old female aviator Wally Funk -- and the youngest -- 18-year-old student Oliver Daemen. Joining them will be Bezos and his brother Mark Bezos. The mission would represent the world’s first unpiloted flight to space with an all-civilian crew. Blue Origin will have none of its staff astronauts or personnel onboard..
WASHINGTON: Jeff Bezos, the richest person in the world, is set to join the astronaut club on Tuesday on the first crewed launch by Blue Origin, another key moment in a big month for the space tourism industry.
The mission comes days after Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson crossed the final frontier, narrowly besting the Amazon magnate in their battle of the billionaires.
Blue Origin’s sights are, however, set higher: both literally in terms of the altitude to which its reusable New Shepard craft will ascend compared to Virgin’s spaceplane, but also in its future ambitions.
“They’ve had 15 successful New Shepard uncrewed flights and we’ve been waiting years to see when they’re going to start flying people,” Laura Forczyk, founder of space consulting firm Astralytical, told AFP.
New Shepard will blast off at 8am on July 20 from a remote facility in the west Texas desert called Launch Site One, some 40km north of the nearest town, Van Horn. The event will be live-streamed on Blue Origin’s official website.
Joining Bezos on the fully autonomous flight will be barrier-breaking woman aviator Wally Funk, who at 82 is set to be the oldest ever astronaut, and Dutch teenager Oliver Daemen, the company’s first paying customer, who will become the youngest astronaut. Rounding out the four-member crew is Jeff Bezos’s brother Mark Bezos.
After lift-off, New Shepard will accelerate towards space at speeds exceeding Mach 3. The capsule will then separate from its booster, and the astronauts unbuckle and begin to experience weightlessness. They will spend a few minutes beyond the Karman line, the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and space, at 100km, as the spacecraft peaks at 106km high.
The booster will return autonomously to a landing pad just north of its launch site, while the capsule free-falls back to Earth before deploying three giant parachutes to land gently in the west Texas desert.