Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, took off into space on Tuesday in a historic flight without a pilot and manned only by civilians from his aerospace company Blue Origin from the Texas desert, a personal and commercial milestone.
The founder of Amazon will overcome
the space frontier
aboard the
New Shepard
spacecraft, an
altitude of around 65 miles
(105 km) and will experience weightlessness, in a flight that will last less than 15 minutes.
"I can't wait to see what it's going to be like.
People who go into space say they come back changed
," the 57-year-old billionaire said excitedly in an interview with TODAY on our sister network NBC News.
Minutes before takeoff, the tycoon could be seen inside the rocket raising his thumb as a sign that everything was going well.
This is the crew that will accompany Jeff Bezos to space
July 19, 202102: 05
The spacecraft took off at 9:12 a.m. (8:00 a.m. local time), 12 minutes later than scheduled, from a point in the Texas desert southeast of El Paso.
Bezos travels with a particular crew made up of three other people.
Wally Funk,
of
82 years,
is a former pilot test and one of the first women to participate in the space mission Mercury 13 in the early 60s, which aimed to show that women could meet NASA standards for join the group of astronauts.
A student will travel to space with Jeff Bezos and will be the youngest person on a space mission
July 16, 202101: 09
The youngest is the Dutch physics student
Oliver Daemen,
just
18 years old,
passionate about space since he was 4 years old and who won a place in the New Shepard at an auction.
Bezos's brother Mark, a close friend and fellow adventurer, completes the quartet.
The flight
The capsule will not go into orbit around Earth, but will reach the edge of space, at an
altitude of around 65 miles
(105 km), where the crew will
experience zero gravity for three and four minutes,
before returning to space. Land with the help of parachute.
The Blue Origin capsule is fully automated, so no trained personnel are needed in the short space jump.
Bezos' attempt to reach space comes after billionaire Richard Branson's trip on July 11 aboard a vehicle developed by his private company, Virgin Galactic.
But unlike Virgin Galactic's Unity space plane, the New Shepard rocket and capsule fly autonomously, with no pilots on board.
On video: Richard Branson is the first billionaire to reach space in his own ship
July 11, 202101: 23
The capsule of the Blue Origin spacecraft is also designed to reach a
higher altitude than the Virgin Galactic vehicle.
The edge of space is often defined by the so-called Kármán line (boundary between atmosphere and outer space), at an estimated altitude of 62 miles (100 km) above sea level.
While the New Shepard capsule will fly above this line, the Virgin Galactic spacecraft achieved only an altitude of around 53 miles (85 km).
The future of space tourism
The launch marks an important step for Blue Origin, which is committed to the future of expensive space travel.
The aerospace company expects to start a series of
operational flights with paid crew members in the near future,
and although it has not announced the price of individual tickets, they are expected to be around several
hundred thousand dollars.
[Elon Musk presents Starship, the spacecraft with which he intends to take passengers to Mars in 2024]
In addition to Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin suborbital excursions, Elon Musk's company, SpaceX, also wants to fly orbital sightseeing flights, with the first mission to space with an all-civilian crew scheduled for this year.
With information from AP and NBC News.
