Bezos set to soar into space today
When Blue Origin launches people into space on Tuesday, founder Jeff Bezos will be on board. No test pilots or flight engineers for Tuesday’s debut flight from West Texas, just Bezos, his brother, an 82-year-old aviation pioneer and a teenage tourist. The capsule is entirely automated, unlike Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic rocket plane that required two pilots to get him to space and back a week ago
BEZOS ON BOARD
Bezos created Blue Origin in 2000, a move that he said prompted his high school girlfriend to observe: “Jeff started Amazon just to get enough money to do Blue Origin — and I can’t prove her rong.” He has said he finances the rocket company by selling $1 illion in Amazon stock a year. Bezos caught the space bug at age while watching Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s moon landing July, 20, 1969. He chose the 52nd anniversary for his own unch. “To see the Earth from space, it changes you. It hanges your relationship with this planet, with umanity,” he said. “It’s a thing I’ve wanted to o all my life.”
WHO ELSE IS FLYING?
Bezos personally invited two of his fellow passengers — his 50-year-old brother Mark , an investor and volunteer firefighter, and female aviation pioneer Wally Funk. Joining them will be Oliver Daemen, a last-minute fill-in for the winner of a $28 million charity auction who had a scheduling conflict. At age 82, Funk will become the oldest person in space. She was among 13 female pilots — the so-called Mercury 13 — who took the same tests in the early 1960s as Nasa’s Mercury 7 astronauts, but were barred because of their gender. “Finally!" Funk exclaimed when offered a seat alongside Bezos. As for the Dutch Daemen — who at 18 will become the youngest person in space — his financier father bid on the capsule seat in June, but dropped out when the price soared. Blue Origin came calling just over a week ago, after the unidentified auction winner switched to a later flight. The teenage space fanatic is Blue Origin’s first paying customer
WHAT’S NEXT?
Blue Origin is expected to open ticket sales soon after Bezos flies and has already lined up some of the other auction bidders. The company hasn't disclosed the cost of a ride. The fourth seat on the upcoming flight was auctioned off for $28 million. Nineteen space advocacy and education groups are getting $1 million each as a result, with the rest to be used by Blue Origin’s Club for the Future for its own education effort. While the diminutive New Shepard is meant to launch people on brief flights to the edge of space, the mega New Glenn will be capable of hauling cargo and eventually crew into orbit from Cape Canaveral, Florida, possibly beginning late next year. Blue Origin also has its eyes on the moon. Its proposed lunar lander, Blue Moon, lost to SpaceX’s Starship in NASA’s recent commercial competition to develop the technology for getting the next astronauts onto the moon. Blue Origin is challenging the contract award, as is the other competitor.
ROCKET AND CAPSULE
While Bezos won’t be the first boss to ride to space on his own rocket, he can lay claim to strapping in for his company’s first human launch. He’s also aiming higher, with an anticipated altitude of about 106km versus Branson’s 86km. Blue Origin’s 18-metre New Shepard rocket will accelerate toward space at three times the speed of sound, or Mach 3, before separating from the capsule and returning for an upright landing. The passengers will experience three to four minutes of weightlessness, before their capsule parachutes onto the desert just 10 minutes after liftoff. That’s five minutes less than Alan Shepard’s 1961 Mercury flight. Blue Origin, though, offers the biggest windows ever built for a spacecraft. Bezos purchased the desolate, parched land for launching and landing rockets. The closest town is Van Horn, population 1,832.