Joining Jeff Bezos was his brother Mark 82-year-old Wally Funk, a pilot who trained for NASA’s Mercury programme in the 1960s but was denied the chance to go into space because she was a woman and 18-year-old Dutch student Oliver Daemen, who won a seat on Blue Origin in an auction (the first-place winner paid US$28 million for a ticket but couldn’t fly because of a “scheduling conflict”, it was reported). Ascending on a rocket rather than a space plane, the round-trip took just ten minutes, compared to Branson’s, which was just over an hour.īlue Origin’s suborbital rocket, New Shepard, features a detachable capsule on its nose that in this case accommodated four private citizens. Just eight days after Richard Branson successfully flew to space aboard his Virgin Galactic spacecraft, Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos completed his company’s first human-crewed mission to the heavens – funded by sales from his other company Amazon. The brief flight-with two pilots on board-was a key milestone for the Virgin Galactic, which is striving to send tourists to space at a cost of $250,000 per seat.Space 0 The Earth’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, briefly left the planet on a Blue Origin flight into space, on July 20, 2021, the 52nd anniversary of the first moon landing. The spaceship made it to a peak height of 51.4 miles (82.7 kilometers). On December 13, 2018, Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo, VSS Unity, flew higher than it ever had before, surpassing what the US Air Force considers the boundary of space (50 miles), and marking the first manned flight to space from US soil since 2011. Virgin Galactic, headed by British billionaire Richard Branson, is also working on a vessel of its own to carry tourists to space. The New Shepard rocket first reached space last year, achieving a height of 66 miles in April 2018. The price per ticket has not yet been announced. The passenger capsule is "roomy," Cornell said, with six seats and six "big gorgeous windows." We want to take our time and do this right." "We are aiming for the end of this year," Cornell said. More test flights lie ahead, but the first flights with passengers on board could start by late 2019. "Looks to have been a wholly successful flight today," wrote Blue Origin on Twitter. The entire mission lasted 10 minutes, 15 seconds. Moments later, the capsule floated to Earth, aided by a trio of parachutes, and touched down in a cloud of dust. "That, everybody, is a reusable rocket," said Cornell. The frontier of space is internationally agreed to be 62 miles (100 kilometers) above Earth, known as the Karman Line.Įight minutes after blast off, the rocket booster fired its engines and made a controlled, upright landing back on Earth, marking the fourth flight for this particular rocket, and the 10th flight test for New Shepard overall. "That is exactly what we were targeting," said Ariane Cornell, an astronaut for Blue Origin and commentator on the company's live webcast of the launch. The rocket, carrying no people on board but eight science experiments for NASA, soared skyward from a launchpad in west Texas at 1508 GMT against a clear blue sky.Ī few minutes into the flight, the capsule separated as planned from the booster and reached its peak height of 66 miles (106 kilometers).
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