Awestruck by Earth’s beauty, says Bezos ater 10-minute flight
The 57-year-old US billionaire, wearing a blue suit and donning a cowboy hat, was joined by 3 crewmates for a trip officially lasting 10 minutes and 10 seconds
WASHINGTON: 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 spacecrat.
The Amazon founder was accompanied by a hand-picked group: his brother, an 18-yearold from the Netherlands and 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 on the desert floor in remote West Texas ater the 10-minute flight.
Bezos said the “most profound” aspect of his brief journey to space was the spectacular view he saw of Earth, which let him amazed by its beauty and fragility.
“Every astronaut who’s been up into space, they say that it changes them ... they look at it and they’re kind of amazed and awestruck by the Earth and its beauty, but also by its fragility, and I can vouch for that,” he told reporters ater Blue Origin’s first crewed flight.
He added that while the atmosphere appeared to be “so big” from the surface, when you get above it “you see is it’s actually incredibly thin, it’s this tiny litle fragile thing, and as we move about the planet we’re damaging it.
“It’s one thing to recognise that intellectually, it’s another thing to actually see with your own eyes.”
The company released footage of the newly minted astronauts performing somersaults in near zero gravity and throwing Skitles which Dutch teen Oliver Daemen caught in his mouth.
“We had a great time, it was wonderful,” added Wally Funk, who at 82 has become the oldest astronaut.
“I want to go again -- fast!” she added. The crew took a number of mementos with them for the 10-minute trip, including a piece of fabric from the Wright brothers’ first plane, a bronze medallion made from the first hot air balloon flight in 1783, and a pair of goggles that belonged to Amelia Earhart.
Named ater America’s first astronaut, 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.
Bezos praised the work of his engineering team and said the design architecture of the New Shepard rocket would eventually be used as the second stage of the much larger New Glenn rocket.
Asked if he would go again, he said: “Hell yes, how fast can we refuel that thing? Let’s go.”
Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man, soared about 107km above the Texas desert aboard his company Blue Origin’s New Shepard launch vehicle on Tuesday and returned safely to Earth, a historic suborbital flight that helps to inaugurate a new era of private commercial space tourism.
“Best day ever,” Bezos, accompanied by the world’s oldest and youngest space travellers, said ater the space capsule touched down, kicking up a cloud of dust on the desert floor.
The 57-year-old American billionaire, wearing a blue flight suit and donning a cowboy hat, was joined by three crewmates for a trip to the edge of space officially lasting 10 minutes and 10 seconds.
Ater landing and exiting the space capsule, Bezos and the other crew members exchanged hugs and popped champagne, spraying each other.
“Astronaut Bezos in my seat - happy, happy, happy,” Bezos said in response to a mission control status check ater the crew members buckled back in aboard New Shepard’s capsule following a few minutes of weightlessness in space.
The fully autonomous 18.3m- tall gleaming white spacecrat, with a blue feather design on its side, ignited its BE-3 engines for a litoff from Blue Origin’s Launch Site One facility about 32km outside the rural town of Van Horn.
There were generally clear skies with a few patchy clouds on a cool morning for the launch.
Bezos, founder of ecommerce company Amazon.com Inc, and his brother Mark Bezos, a private equity executive, were joined by two others. Pioneering female aviator Wally Funk, 82, and recent high school graduate Oliver Daemen,18, became the oldest and youngest people to reach space.
The flight came nine days ater Briton Richard Branson was aboard his competing space tourism company Virgin Galactic’s successful inaugural suborbital flight from New Mexico.
The two flights give credibility and inject enthusiasm into the fledgling space tourism industry that the Swiss bank UBS estimates will be worth $3 billion annually in a decade.
“Well done,” Branson wrote on Twiter, congratulating Bezos and his crewmates.
Bezos founded Blue Origin two decades ago. This was its first crewed space flight.
“This is a tiny litle step of what Blue Origin is going to do,” Bezos told CNBC ater the flight.
“What we’re really trying to do is build reusable space vehicles. It’s the only way to build a road to space, and we need to build a road to space so that our children can build the future.”
New Shepard hurtled at speeds reaching 3,595kph, exceeding the so-called Kármán line - 100km) - set by an international aeronautics body to define the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and space.
Ater the capsule separated from the booster, the crew unbuckled to experience weightlessness.
The capsule returned to Earth under parachutes, using a retro-thrust system that expelled a “pillow of air” for a sot landing.
Bezos gave a thumbs-up sign inside the capsule ater landing, stepped out to cheers, then exchanged high-fives with some of the roughly two dozen family members and company employees on hand.
Branson got to space first, but Bezos flew higher - Virgin Galactic managed an altitude of 86km - in what experts called the world’s first unpiloted space flight with an all-civilian crew.
The flight came on the anniversary of Americans Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin becoming the first humans to walk on the moon, on July 20, 1969.
New Shepard is named for Alan Shepard, who in 1961 became the first American in space.
Funk was one of the so-called Mercury 13 group of women who trained to become Nasa astronauts in the early 1960s but was passed over because of her gender. Daemen, Blue Origin’s first paying customer, is set to study physics and innovation management at college in the Netherlands.
His father, who heads investment management firm Somerset Capital Partners, was on site to watch his son fly. New Shepard is a rocket-and-capsule combo that cannot be piloted from inside the spacecrat. It is completely computer-flown and had none of Blue Origin’s staff astronauts or trained personnel onboard.