Founder and owner of Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos made a successful flight into space from the landfill in Texas. The event was broadcast on YouTube.
The launch took place on July 20 at 16:12 Moscow time and was timed to coincide with the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, the first-ever landing on the moon. The flight was carried out on the Blue Origin ship New Shepard. Bezos was accompanied by his brother Mark, 82-year-old former aviator Wally Funk and 18-year-old high school graduate Oliver Damen. Thus, the youngest and the oldest man visited space at the same time.
The flight lasted only 11 minutes
New Shepard gained enough speed in 110 seconds to throw the ship with people over the Karman line at an altitude of 100 kilometers. This is the universally recognized boundary of the cosmos. The crew stayed in zero gravity for four minutes. After that, the ship landed on three parachutes a few kilometers from the launch point. The flight was fully automatic, and the crew did not operate the equipment.
The members of the flight were the world’s richest man Jeff Bezos and his brother Mark, as well as the son of the founder and CEO of the wealth management company Somerset Capital Partners, Jos Dayman, Oliver, and the first female aviation safety inspector at the Federal Aviation Administration Wally Funk. Oliver Damen won the seat through an auction, but the cost of the seat was not disclosed. Funk had planned to go into space back in 1961.
Bezos also auctioned one of the four seats on the ship for $ 28 million. However, the name of the buyer was not disclosed, and he will go into space as part of one of the future crews. The proceeds from the auction will go to the Club for the Future Foundation, which aims to stimulate and support people in the natural sciences and engineering.
Another billionaire went into space before Bezos
Mission NS-16 is the 16th for New Shepard and the first to be completed with a human. Following the success of this mission, New Shepard could launch two more times in 2021. A spacecraft for suborbital flights consists of a manned capsule that launches vertically from a single-stage reusable launch vehicle and lands with parachutes. The main purpose of the system is space tourism, and it is estimated that one seat on the ship costs about $250.
On July 11, British billionaire Richard Branson made a suborbital flight aboard Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity spacecraft. With Branson on board, pilots Dave McKay and Michael Masucci, Virgin Galactic Chief Astronaut Instructor Beth Moses, Lead Operations Engineer Colin Bennett, and Sirish Bundle’s vice president of government relations.
The ship crossed the 80 km mark and the crew was also in zero gravity for four minutes. After that, the pilots carried out manual braking and, in glider mode, landed him on the runway of the spaceport “America”. At the same time, Blue Origin refused to recognize this as a flight into space, since Branson’s “high-altitude plane” did not reach the Karman line.