A new era of private commercial space tourism - Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man completes successful historic first space jaunt
On Tuesday, Jeff Bezos, the world's richest man, flew 66.5 miles (107 kilometers) above the Texas desert on his company Blue Origin's New Shepard launch vehicle and safely returned to Earth, marking the start of a new age of private commercial space tourism.
After the space capsule landed in a cloud of dust on the desert floor, Bezos exclaimed, "Best day ever."
The 57-year-old American billionaire, who was dressed in a blue flight suit and wore a cowboy hat, was accompanied by three crew members on a journey to the edge of space that lasted around 10 minutes and 20 seconds.
After landing and exiting the space capsule, Bezos and the other crew members exchanged hugs and popped champagne, spraying each other.
“Astronaut Bezos in my seat – happy, happy, happy,” Bezos said in response to a mission control status check after the crew members buckled back in aboard New Shepard’s capsule following a few minutes of weightlessness in 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, become the oldest and youngest people to reach space.
The fully autonomous 60-foot-tall (18.3-meters-tall) gleaming white spacecraft, with a blue feather design on its side, 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 flight came nine days after Briton Richard Branson was aboard his competing space tourism company Virgin Galactic’s successful inaugural suborbital flight from New Mexico.
After landing on the desert floor, Bezos gave a thumbs-up signal from inside the capsule.
He walked out to the cheers of his family and Blue Origin staff, and he gave high-fives to some of the about two dozen people in attendance.
Blue Origin was formed by him two decades ago. This was SpaceX's first crewed mission to orbit.
New Shepard was designed to hurtle at speeds upwards of 2,200 miles (3,540 km) per hour to an altitude reaching the so-called Kármán line – 62 miles (100 km) – set by an international aeronautics body as defining the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and space.
After the capsule separated from the booster, the crew unbuckled for the few minutes of weightlessness. The capsule then returned to Earth under parachutes, using a retro-thrust system that expelled a “pillow of air” for a soft landing.
The mission was part of a fiercely competitive battle between Bezos’ Blue Origin and Branson’s Virgin Galactic to tap a potentially lucrative space tourism market the Swiss bank UBS estimates will be worth $3 billion annually in a decade.
Branson got to space first, but Bezos flew higher – Virgin Galactic managed an altitude of 53 miles (86 km) – in what experts called the world’s first unpiloted space flight with an all-civilian crew.
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 at college in the Netherlands.
His father, who heads investment management firm Somerset Capital Partners, was on site to watch his son fly to space.
New Shepard is a 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. The reusable Blue Origin 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.
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