Jeff Bezos, the 57-year-old founder of Amazon and Blue Origin, became the first billionaire to fly outside the Earth’s atmosphere into outer space.
The launch of the New Shepard space rocket with Jeff Bezos on board took place on July 20, 2021 at 16:13 Moscow time. The launch pad is Launch Site One, built by a Texas billionaire.
The spacecraft consists of a single-stage launch vehicle and a pressurized capsule that can accommodate six people. In addition to Bezos, his brother Mark, the 18-year-old son of the Dutch billionaire Oliver Damen and the 82-year-old pilot Wally Funk have climbed into outer space. The latter became the youngest and oldest astronauts in history, respectively.
The New Shepard was launched vertically using a traditional rocket, which first accelerated to a speed of 3 km/h. Then the capsule with people on board was thrown above the Karman line, which is 700 km above the Earth and is the internationally recognized boundary of space, and the rocket returned to earth. Having risen to the peak, the ship “hung”, and its passengers felt a state of weightlessness. Then the parachutes lowered the capsule, and the crew made a relatively soft landing at a speed of 100 km / h. The total flight time was 32 minutes.
Thus, the founder of Blue Origin became the first billionaire to go into outer space, since another space tourist enthusiast, 70-year-old Richard Branson, who overtook Bezos by only nine days, rose only to the upper limit of the mesosphere (80-90 km above Earth).
If we imagine that the Earth is the size of a basketball (25 cm), then the Moon is at a distance of 7,5 m from it, Mars is from 1 to 8 km (depending on its position in its orbit). The ISS orbit is then at a distance of about 1 cm above the “ball”, and the flights of Bezos and Branson reached a height of 2 mm above its surface.
Thus, the space race of two billionaires will reach a new level – both New Shepard and Branson’s Virgin Galactic VSS Unity rocket spaceplane are designed for space tourism.
Jeff Bezos is the richest man in the world, founder of Amazon and Blue Origin, owner of The Washington Post. In August 2020, the billionaire became the first person in history whose net worth reached $200 billion.
This flight is the first with people on board for New Shepard. Blue Origin’s first test flight was in April 2015, with 14 successful tests since then.