If Bezos were anyone else, the story of his spaceflight, of a dream fulfilled, would be simple and sweet.īut if Bezos were anyone else, he wouldn’t have been able to fulfill this dream at all. He remembers watching Apollo 11’s moon landing on his family’s television as a 5-year-old, and as a high-school valedictorian, he spoke about the importance of space travel. Most people know Bezos primarily as the founder of Amazon-in the least flattering version, an ultra-wealthy boss who overworks his employees and hasn’t always paid his share of federal income taxes. Future Blue Origin customers need only show up a few days before launch for some light training on their fully autonomous ride. Shepard, a military pilot, spent months preparing to fly his NASA capsule. They followed a similar trajectory as Shepard did in 1961, but the Blue Origin experience is thoroughly, well, Amazon-like. The passengers flew on a rocket called New Shepard, named for the astronaut Alan Shepard, the first American to reach space. For this crew, Blue Origin had made spaceflight feel almost as smooth as same-day shipping. The rocket was back on the launchpad, standing tall, after tearing through the atmosphere with a sonic boom. The Blue Origin rocket rose into the sky with a rumble that echoed across the West Texas desert, and about 11 minutes later, it was all over-the passenger capsule parachuted down, and the Bezos brothers, Funk, and Daemen climbed out, grinning widely. The journey was lightning-fast by spaceflight standards.
By going first, Bezos wanted to prove that his vehicle is safe, and that Blue Origin is finally ready to make its 11-minute suborbital trips an experience people can buy. Before today, Bezos’s private space company, Blue Origin, had not flown its rocket with any people on board. This morning, the richest person on Earth boarded a reusable rocket he dreamed up and funded, launched to the edge of space to experience a few minutes of weightlessness, and then came back down.īezos made the trip with three people who decided they trusted him enough with their lives: his brother, Mark Bezos Wally Funk, a storied aviator and Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old fresh out of high school. VAN HORN, Texas-Jeff Bezos really flew to space.
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