Bezos plans to blast off into space
CAPE CANAVERAL, FLA.» Outdoing his fellow billionaires in daredevilry, Jeff Bezos will blast into space next month when his Blue Origin company makes its first flight with a crew.
The 57-year-old Amazon founder and richest person in the world by Forbes’ estimate will become the first person to ride his own rocket to space.
Bezos announced his intentions Monday and, in an even bolder show of confidence, said he will share the adventure with his younger brother and best friend, Mark, an investor and volunteer firefighter. He said that will make it more meaningful.
Blue Origin’s debut flight with people aboard — after 15 successful test flights of its reusable New Shepard rockets — will take place on July 20, a date selected because it is the 52nd anniversary of the first moon landing by Apollo 11’s Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.
The Bezos brothers will launch from remote West Texas alongside the winner of an online charity auction. There’s no word yet on who else might fill the six-person capsule during the 10-minute flight that will take its passengers to an altitude of about 65 miles, just beyond the edge of space, and then return to Earth without going into orbit.
Bezos said he has dreamed of traveling to space since he was 5.
“To see the Earth from space, it changes you. It changes your relationship with this planet, with humanity. It’s one Earth,” Bezos said in an Instagram post. “I want to go on this flight because it’s a thing I’ve wanted to do all my life. It’s an adventure. It’s a big deal for me.”
Added his brother: “I wasn’t even expecting him to say that he was going to be on the first flight, and then when he asked me to go along, I was just awestruck.”
Bezos will step down as Amazon’s CEO 15 days before liftoff. He announced months ago that he wants to spend more time on his rocket company as well as his newspaper, The Washington Post.
His stake in Amazon stands at $164 billion, which will make him by far the wealthiest person to fly to space.
Until now, thrill-seeking billionaires have had to buy capsule seats from the Russian space program or, more recently, Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which plans its first private flight in September. These orbital trips, generally lasting several days, with visits to the International Space Station, have cost tens of millions of dollars per person.
The flight by Blue Origin’s New Shepard capsule, named for Alan Shepard, the first American in space, will last five minutes less than Shepard’s history-marking suborbital ride aboard a Mercury capsule in 1961.
But Blue Origin’s capsule is 10 times roomier with a huge window at every seat — the biggest windows ever built for a spacecraft, in fact.