Agency Report — Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man, will today from a base in Van Horn, Texas blast off to Space aboard his company Blue Origin’s New Shepard launch vehicle, as part of a history-making crew.
The flight will be another milestone in ushering in a new era of private space travel. And it is New Shepard’s 16th flight.
A typical New Shepard flight lasts 11 minutes.
The American billionaire is due to fly from the desert site in West Texas on an 11-minute voyage to the edge of space nine days after British rival Richard Branson was aboard his competing space tourism company Virgin Galactic’s successful inaugural suborbital flight.
Branson got to space first, but Bezos is due to fly higher – 62 miles (100 km) for Blue Origin compared to 53 miles (86 km) for Virgin Galactic.
Bezo’s will be the world’s first unpiloted space flight with an all-civilian crew.
Bezos, founder of ecommerce juggernaut Amazon.com Inc, and his brother and private equity executive Mark Bezos will be joined in the flight by two others.
Pioneering female aviator, 82 year-old Wally Funk and recent high school graduate Oliver Daemen, 18, are set to become the oldest and youngest people to reach space.
“I am excited, but not anxious. We’ll see how I feel when I’m strapped into my seat,” Bezos said in an interview with Fox Business Network on Monday.
“We’re ready. The vehicle’s ready. This team is amazing. I feel very good about it. And I think my fellow crewmates feel good about it, too.”
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 attend the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands to study physics and innovation management in September.
His father heads investment management firm Somerset Capital Partners.
Barring technical or weather-related delays, New Shepard is due to blast off around 8 a.m. CDT (1300 GMT) from Blue Origin’s Launch Site One facility some 20 miles (32 km) outside the rural Texas town of Van Horn.
MINUTES OF WEIGHTLESSNESS
New Shepard is a 60-foot-tall (18.3-meters-tall) and fully autonomous rocket-and-capsule combo that cannot be piloted from inside the spacecraft. It is completely computer-flown and will have none of Blue Origin’s staff astronauts or trained personnel onboard.
In contrast, Virgin Galactic used a space plane with a pair of pilots onboard.
New Shepard is set to hurtle at speeds upwards of 2,200 miles (3,540 km) per hour to an altitude of about 62 miles (100 km), the so-called Kármán line set by an international aeronautics body as defining the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and space.
During the flight, the crew will unbuckle for a few minutes of weightlessness and gaze back at the Earth’s curvature through what Blue Origin calls the largest windows ever used in space travel.
Then, the capsule falls back to Earth under parachutes, using a last-minute retro-thrust system that expels a “pillow of air” for a soft landing at 1 mph (1.6 km/h) in the Texas desert.
The reusable booster is due to return to the launch pad using drag brakes and ring and wedge fins for stabilization.
Bezos, who founded Blue Origin in 2000, has a net worth of $206 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
He stepped down this month as Amazon CEO but remains its executive chairman.
