Above and beyond
Billionaire Jeff Bezos blasts into space on own rocket
It took 10 minutes and 10 seconds on Tuesday for Jeff Bezos to fulfill his space goal of more than 20 years.
The 57-year-old Amazon founder, his brother and two others formed the crew with the youngest and oldest people ever to go into space. They lifted off in Blue Origin’s New Shepard spacecraft, rising more than 100 kilometers into the sky.
“Best day ever!” said Bezos after touching down near the launch site in West Texas. “My expectations were high, and they were dramatically exceeded.”
Wearing a cowboy hat and blue flight suit, Bezos and his companions hugged relatives, friends and company employees when they got out of the capsule. Later, Bezos and his team members celebrated by popping open Champagne bottles near the rocket ship.
“It felt so serene and peaceful, and the floating, ... it’s a very pleasurable experience,” said Bezos of the weightlessness that he and his flight companions experienced.
Bezos is the world’s richest man and the second billionaire to travel into space this month. Richard Branson made his suborbital trip on July 11, traveling with five others about 87 km up in a spacecraft built by his company Virgin Galactic.
With his company Space Exploration Technologies, billionaire Elon Musk plans to take four commercial passengers into orbit on one of the company’s Crew Dragon capsules. SpaceX has also been completing launches for commercial customers and government agencies.
The launch of New Shepard went smoothly from its launch at Van Horn in Texas at 8:11 am local time until it floated down to Earth.
Apollo 11 honored
The flight was timed to coincide with the same period when the Apollo 11 mission landed on the moon in 1969.
Over the past six years, Blue Origin has conducted 15 successful test flights without people aboard, leading engineers to decide that New Shepard was finally ready for passengers.
Accompanying Bezos on board were his 53-year-old brother Mark; Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old Dutch student and Blue Origin’s first commercial passenger; and Wally Funk, an 82-year-old former pilot who was among a group of women in the 1960s that passed the same rigorous NASA astronaut selection criteria as men did. However, Funk never had the chance to board a rocket until Tuesday.
“Thank you,” she told Bezos afterward.
The capsule carrying them detached from the rocket at an altitude of about 76 km and continued upward to 107 km, passing the 100km boundary often considered to be the beginning of outer space.
Then, all the passengers unbuckled and floated around the capsule, experiencing about four minutes of free fall.
The booster landed vertically near the launch site. The capsule then descended under parachutes, gently setting down in a puff of dust.
Shortly after, the four emerged euphorically from the capsule.
Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000 and began acquiring land in Texas to build the private facility used for Tuesday’s launch. The company hired talent to develop rockets, engines and spacecraft and now employs more than 3,500 people at facilities in Florida, California and other locations.
In 2017, Bezos announced that he would sell $1 billion of Amazon stock a year to fund the space venture.