The founder and outgoing CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, announced that he will fly into space with his brother next month, ahead of competitors in the space race, billionaire Elon Musk and Richard Branson.
This will be the first crewed flight conducted by Bezos’s space company, Blue Origin. The flight is scheduled for July 20, coinciding with the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing.
Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos inspects the New Shepard launch facility in West Texas. A seat on his upcoming flight is being auctioned. (Photo: EPA).
Bezos and his brother Mark, a former advertising executive and volunteer firefighter, will be joined on the flight by the winner of an auction for a seat on the spacecraft, with a starting bid of $2.8 million.
In an Instagram post, billionaire Bezos stated that he has dreamed of traveling to space since he was five years old. “I will make this journey with my brother. The greatest adventure, with my best friend,” the Amazon founder declared.
With a personal fortune estimated at $186.2 billion, Jeff Bezos is among a group of billionaire entrepreneurs driving a “new space race,” each pumping billions of dollars into their private startup companies aimed at developing affordable, commercial space travel.
However, while Virgin Galactic founder and British billionaire Richard Branson is expected to conduct a suborbital flight later this year, and Elon Musk of SpaceX has vowed to “die on Mars,” Bezos is the first among this trio of famous billionaires to reach the edge of space.
Musk has yet to comment on Bezos’s latest announcement, while Branson congratulated his rival, stating that their two companies are “opening up access to space.”
“Congratulations to Jeff Bezos and his brother Mark on announcing their plans to fly to space. Jeff started building Blue Origin in 2000, we started building Virgin Galactic in 2004, and now both are opening up access to space – it’s extraordinary!” billionaire Branson tweeted.
Musk and Bezos are said to have clashed over various projects for more than a decade. Elon Musk has labeled his tech giant rival as a “copycat” in some of Amazon’s business initiatives, while Bezos has mocked Musk’s plans to send people to Mars.
Bezos’s company Blue Origin was founded in 2000, promoting itself as a means to provide cheaper access to space through the use of reusable rockets – specifically, New Shepard, which has flown 15 times.
Jeff Bezos’s space tourism project with Blue Origin is competing with a similar program being developed by SpaceX, the rocket company founded and operated by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic.
In April 2017, Bezos revealed that he invests about $1 billion in Blue Origin annually through Amazon stock. Blue Origin’s spacecraft system includes a pressurized crew capsule mounted atop the reusable New Shepard launch vehicle.
On the first crewed flight into space, the crew aboard New Shepard will experience at least 10 minutes of weightlessness inside the capsule.
Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000. The upcoming space flight marks the culmination of over two decades of Jeff Bezos’s foray into the space sector, who announced plans to step down as CEO of Amazon just 15 days before the flight. Instead, he will become the Executive Chairman of the company he founded in a garage in 1994 – allowing him “time and energy” to focus on other business projects.
Blue Origin named its space rocket program New Shepard after astronaut Alan Shepard, the first American to fly into space exactly 60 years ago. The upcoming flight will mark a significant milestone in the mission to take paying customers beyond the Earth’s atmosphere.
However, currently, Elon Musk’s SpaceX seems to be leading the billionaire space race with numerous launches carrying NASA equipment to the ISS and partnerships to send tourists into space in 2021.
On February 6, 2018, SpaceX launched a rocket aimed at Martian orbit, over 220 million kilometers from Earth, and NASA selected two astronauts to participate in the first crewed Dragon mission conducted by SpaceX.
SpaceX has also begun launching a series of 60 satellites into space to help form its Starlink network. Musk hopes this program will build a network of interconnected satellites around the globe, providing free internet access to people worldwide.
Meanwhile, billionaire Richard Branson and Virgin Galactic are taking a different approach to conquering space. Virgin Galactic has conducted several successful test flights of its Unity spacecraft, the first occurring in December 2018 and the most recent on February 22 this year.
More than 600 wealthy customers, including celebrities like Brad Pitt and Katy Perry, have reserved seats at $250,000 each for one of Virgin’s space flights.
Richard Branson introduces SpaceShipTwo, a spacecraft that accommodates 6 passengers and 2 pilots. (Photo: Reuters).
SpaceShipTwo from Virgin Galactic can carry six passengers and two pilots. Each passenger has a seat with two large windows – one on the side and one on top. Passengers will become “astronauts” when they reach the Karman line, the boundary of Earth’s atmosphere. The spacecraft will then perform a suborbital journey with about six minutes of weightlessness. The entire flight lasts approximately 1.5 hours.
