Blastoff: Tycoons prepare to ride their own rockets

CAPE CANAVERAL — Two billionaires are putting everything on the line this month to ride their own rockets into space.

It’s intended to be a flashy confidence boost for customers seeking their own short joyrides.

The lucrative, highstakes chase for space tourists will unfold on the fringes of space — 55 to 66 miles up, pitting Virgin Galactic’s Richard Branson against the world’s richest man, Blue Origin’s Jeff Bezos.

Branson is due to take off Sunday from New Mexico, launching with two pilots and three other employees aboard a rocket plane carried aloft by a doublefuselage aircraft.

Bezos departs nine days later from West Texas, blasting off in a fully automated capsule with three guests: his brother, an 82yearold female aviation pioneer who’s waited six decades for a shot at space and the winner of a $28 million charity auction.

Branson’s flight will be longer, but Bezos’ will be higher. Branson’s craft has more windows, but Bezos’ windows are bigger. Branson’s piloted plane has already flown to space three times. Bezos’ has five times as many test flights, though none with people on board.

Either way, they’re shooting for skyhigh bragging rights as the first person to fly his own rocket to space and experience three to four minutes of weightlessness.

Branson, who turns 71 in another week, considers it “very important” to try it out before allowing space tourists on board. He insists he’s not apprehensive; this is the thrillseeking adventurer who’s kitesurfed across the English Channel and attempted to circle the world in a hot air balloon.

“As a child, I wanted to go to space. When that did not look likely for my generation, I registered the name Virgin Galactic with the notion of creating a company that could make it happen,” Branson wrote in a blog last week. Seventeen years after founding Virgin Galactic, he’s on the cusp of experiencing space for himself.

“It’s amazing where an idea can lead you, no matter how farfetched it may seem at first.”

Bezos, 57, who stepped down Monday as Amazon’s CEO, announced in early June that he’d be on his New Shepard rocket’s first passenger flight, choosing the 52nd anniversary of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s moon landing.

He too had childhood dreams of traveling to space, Bezos said via Instagram. “On July 20th, I will take that journey with my brother. The greatest adventure, with my best friend.” Branson was supposed to fly later this year on the second of three more test flights planned by Virgin Galactic before flying ticket holders next year. But he leapfrogged ahead.

He insists he’s not trying to beat Bezos and that it’s not a race. Yet his announcement came just hours after Bezos revealed he’d be joined in space by Wally Funk, one of the last surviving members of the socalled Mercury 13. The 13 female pilots never made it to space despite passing the same tests in the early 1960s as NASA’s original, allmale Mercury 7 astronauts.

Blue Origin’s flights last 10 minutes by the time the capsule parachutes onto the desert floor. Virgin Galactic’s last around 14 to 17 minutes from the time the space plane drops from the mothership and fires its rocket motor for a steep climb until it glides to a runway landing.