Jeff Bezos, Earth’s richest person, blasts into space: ‘Best day ever!’
- The Blue Origin rocket launched from Texas on Tuesday in its first crewed mission
- The 57-year-old US billionaire flew on a voyage lasting about 10 minutes and 20 seconds to the edge of space, nine days after Briton Richard Branson
Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man, and three crewmates soared high above the Texas desert aboard his space venture Blue Origin’s New Shepard launch vehicle on Tuesday and returned safely to Earth, a historic suborbital flight that helps to inaugurate a new era of private commercial space tourism.
The spacecraft ignited its BE-3 engines for a liftoff from Blue Origin’s Launch Site One facility about 32km (20 miles) outside the rural town of Van Horn, flying about 107km above the planet’s surface. There were generally clear skies with a few patchy clouds on a cool morning for the launch.
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‘Best day ever’: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos launches to space
The 57-year-old US billionaire flew on a voyage lasting about 10 minutes and 20 seconds to the edge of space, nine days after Briton Richard Branson was aboard his competing space tourism company Virgin Galactic’s successful inaugural suborbital flight from New Mexico.
New Shepard was designed to hurtle at speeds upwards of 3,540kmh (2,200mph) to an altitude beyond the so-called Kármán line - 100km (62 miles) - set by an international aeronautics body as defining the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and space.
After the capsule separates from the booster, the crew was due to have unbuckled for a few minutes of weightlessness. Then the capsule returned to Earth under parachutes, using a last-minute retro-thrust system that expelled a “pillow of air” for a soft landing in the Texas desert.
