![]() ![]() ![]() “They’re obviously going a little bit higher, a little bit faster, but they’re still only going to have just a few minutes of low microgravity experience before coming right back down,” Wendy Whitman Cobb, a professor at the US Air Force’s School of Air and Space Studies, told Recode. Like that flight, those traveling on Blue Origin’s New Shepard were given a stunning view of Earth and had the chance to experience weightlessness. That’s about 62 miles above the Earth’s surface, about 10 miles higher than Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic flight earlier this month. Meanwhile, Blue Origin’s capsule headed to the apex of its flight path and crossed the Kármán line, the internationally recognized border between Earth’s atmosphere and space. A few minutes into the flight, the capsule separated from the booster, which then headed back toward Earth and landed vertically (ensuring it’s reusable for future flights). To reach space, New Shepard moves incredibly quickly: faster than Mach 3, or more than three times the speed of sound. The July 20 Blue Origin flight involves a large rocket that shoots a capsule, where the human passengers sit, into space. At liftoff, the vehicle launched toward space, carrying a six-seat capsule containing Bezos and the other passengers, pushed upward by a powerful, 60-foot-tall booster rocket. Tuesday’s flight pathĪround 9:15 am ET on July 20, Blue Origin’s rocket took off from a remote desert in West Texas. Bezos has invested billions of his own money into Blue Origin, and his company recently auctioned a ticket to space on one of its rockets for $28 million.Īt a pre-launch mission briefing on Sunday, Blue Origin’s director of astronaut sales Ariane Cornell said two more flights were anticipated this year and that the company had “already built a robust pipeline of customers that are interested.” Analysts at the investment banking firm Canaccord Genuity have estimated that tourism to suborbital space could be an $8 billion industry by the end of the decade.īlue Origin hosted a live feed on its website. ![]() On July 11, Richard Branson, fellow billionaire and the founder of space tourism company Virgin Galactic, beat Bezos to the border of space when he flew there on a 90-minute trip with five other passengers on one of his company’s planes.īezos’s and Branson’s space travel is a reminder that space is no longer only a place where national governments set out to explore and to learn more about the universe, but a terrain that private businesses are capitalizing on. But more importantly, the journey signals that the era of civilian space tourism is officially here - or at least, it is for the very wealthy. Tuesday is the first time the rocket carried humans to space. The billionaire - carried in a rocket built by his spaceflight company Blue Origin and accompanied by three fellow space tourists - joins a small but growing number of people who have traveled to space but aren’t professionally trained astronauts.īezos’s trip is a big deal for Blue Origin - although its New Shepard rocket, named after the first American to visit space, Alan Shepard, has already had 15 successful test flights. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has flown straight to the border of space.
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