By Eric M. Johnson
The spacecraft ignited its BE-3 engines for a liftoff from Blue Origin’s Launch Site One facility about 20 miles (32 km) outside the rural town of Van Horn. There were generally clear skies with a few patchy clouds on a cool morning for the launch.
The 57-year-old American billionaire is flying on a planned 11-minute voyage to the edge of space, nine days after Briton Richard Branson was aboard his competing space tourism company Virgin Galactic’s successful inaugural suborbital flight from New Mexico.
Bezos, wearing a blue flight suit and cowboy hat, and the other passengers climbed into an SUV vehicle for a short drive to the launch pad before walking up a tower and getting aboard the gleaming white spacecraft, with a blue feather design on its side. Each passenger rang a shiny bell before boarding the craft’s capsule.
“They are in for the flight of a lifetime,” launch presenter Ariane Cornell of Blue Origin said on a live webcast.
Branson got to space first, but Bezos is due to fly higher – 62 miles (100 km) for Blue Origin compared to 53 miles (86 km) for Virgin Galactic – in what experts call the world’s first unpiloted space flight with an all-civilian crew. It represents Blue Origin’s first crewed flight to space.
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, are becoming the oldest and youngest people to reach space.
The flight coincides with 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 in the Netherlands. His father, who heads investment management firm Somerset Capital Partners, was on site to watch his son fly to space.
The launch was being witnessed by members of the Bezos family and Blue Origin employees, and a few spectators gathered along the highway before dawn.
MINUTES OF WEIGHTLESSNESS
New Shepard is a 60-foot-tall (18.3-meters-tall) and fully autonomous rocket-and-capsule combo that cannot be piloted from inside the spacecraft. It is completely computer-flown and had none of Blue Origin’s staff astronauts or trained personnel onboard.
Virgin Galactic used a space plane with a pair of pilots onboard.
New Shepard was designed to hurtle at speeds upwards of 2,200 miles (3,540 km) per hour to an altitude of about 62 miles (100 km), the so-called Kármán line set by an international aeronautics body as defining the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and space.
After the capsule separates from the booster, the crew was due to have unbuckled for a few minutes of weightlessness. Then the capsule was due to fall back to Earth under parachutes, using a last-minute retro-thrust system that expels a “pillow of air” for a soft landing in the Texas desert.
The reusable booster had previously flown twice to space.
The launch represented another step in the race to establish a space tourism sector that Swiss investment bank UBS estimates will reach $3 billion annually in a decade. Another billionaire tech mogul, Elon Musk, plans to send an all-civilian crew on a several-day orbital mission on his Crew Dragon capsule in September.
On Twitter, Musk wished the Blue Origin crew “best of luck” hours before the launch.
Blue Origin aims for the first of two more passenger flights this year to happen in September or October.
Blue Origin appears to have a reservoir of future customers. More than 6,000 people from at least 143 countries entered an auction to become the first paying customer. The auction winner, who made a $28 million bid, dropped out of Tuesday’s flight, opening the way for Daemen. Virgin Galactic has said 600 people have booked reservations, priced at about $250,000 per ticket.
Branson has said he aims ultimately to lower the price to about $40,000 per seat.
Bezos has a net worth of $206 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He stepped down this month as Amazon CEO but remains its executive chairman.
(Reporting by Eric M. Johnson in Van Horn, Texas; Additional reporting Radhika Anilkumar; Editing by Will Dunham and Timothy Heritage)
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Agreed …but I wonder if either saw the out of control fires in parts of the US and large parts of Russia? What of the large parts of ancient Europe now washed away ? They will have to confront that reality on earth again … but maybe they are planning on not returning to Gaia ? AND what to do with all that LOOT they are sitting on ?
Fantastic! We only develop by testing our boundaries. What may seem like a waste of money today delivers the future that we live in every day. When I was 10 a TV program called “The Man from Uncle” had the agents using hand held communicators that worked remotely, no wires, that seemed way out there at the time 1962. Some 58 years later cel phones and the internet have transformed our world bringing huge benefits to society – economically, socially etc. .I wish I could live for another 100 years as the possibilities seem endlessly exciting. As Einstein is attributed to have said “Imagination is more important than fact”. If SA can move on from its present troubles, which I’m sure it will – common sense can surely not desert us forever, we will make a meaningful contribution to this exciting future. All power to the Bezos’s, Branson’s, Musk’s and the like. They built fantastic businesses, which have benefitted millions of people. There is argument they get to be too wealthy. Trouble is, who decides how much is too much?