‘Best day ever’: Jeff Bezos blasts into space on his own rocket
Jeff Bezos blasted into space on Tuesday on his rocket company’s first flight with people on board, becoming the second billionaire in just over a week to ride his own spacecraft.
The Amazon founder was accompanied by a hand-picked group: his brother Mark, Oliver Daemenan, an 18-year-old from the Netherlands, and Wally Funk, an 82-year-old aviation pioneer from Texas - the youngest and oldest to ever fly in space.
“Best day ever!” Bezos said when the capsule touched down
VAN HORN, TEXAS:
on the desert floor in Texas after the flight that lasted 10 minutes and 10 seconds.
Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket soared on the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, a date chosen by Bezos for its historical significance. He held fast to it, even as Virgin Galactic’s Richard Branson pushed up his own flight from New Mexico in the race for space tourist dollars and beat him to space by nine days.
Unlike Branson’s piloted rocket plane, Bezos’s capsule was completely automated and required no staff on board for the up-and-down flight.
Blue Origin reached an altitude of about 106km, more than 16km higher than Branson’s July 11 ride. The 60-foot (18-metre) booster accelerated to Mach 3 or three times the speed of sound to get the capsule high, before separating and landing upright.
The passengers had several minutes of weightlessness to float around the spacious white capsule with huge windows. Cheering, whooping and exclamations of “wow” could be heard from the capsule through an audio feed.
The capsule landed under parachutes, with Bezos and his guests briefly experiencing nearly six times the force of gravity on the way back.