Jeff Bezos Launches Into Space On Rocket’s 1st Crew Flight
Jeff Bezos traveled to the edge of space, becoming the second billionaire to do so. He did this aboard a rocket built by his company, Blue Origin. Jeff Bezos, who stepped down as the CEO of Amazon, a company he also founded, embarked on Blue Origin’s New Shepard, launch vehicle’s maiden flight with three crewmates. Together with Jeff on the 11-minute flight was his brother Mark Bezos and the youngest and oldest persons ever to fly into space: An 18-year-old physics student, Oliver Daemen, and Wally Funk, an 82-year-old pioneering female aviator. Joes Daemen, the CEO of Somerset Capital partners, paid for his seat was also on the flight. This was specifically after the winner of the $28 million anonymous auctions for the flight ran into a scheduling conflict and had to postpone.
The crew buzzed off on a special anniversary
The flight took off from Van Horn, Texas, the company’s facilities, on July 20th at 9 a.m ET. This date is significant because, on this very day in 1969, Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, aboard Apollo 11’s Eagle, became the initial humans to land on the moon.
Bragging right over Richard Branson
The suborbital flight aboard New Shepherd was planned to take the crew beyond approximately 62 miles or roughly 330,000 feet above the earth, past the internationally recognized boundary of space known as the Kármán line. This flight gave Jeff Bezos company Blue Origin which he founded in 2000, bragging rights overs Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic’s whose flight aboard SpaceShipTwo reached a 282, 000 feet peak attitude, surpassing the designated Earth-space boundary by NASA of 50 miles but also falling short of the Kármán line.