Billionaire Jeff Bezos takes off in space

Published on : 07/20/2021 – 04:39

Jeff Bezos, the richest man on the planet, joined the astronaut club on Tuesday July 19 on board the first manned flight for his company Blue Origin, marking a new stage for the burgeoning space tourism industry.

The mission comes nine days after the founder of Virgin Galactic Richard Branson also crossed the confines of the earth’s atmosphere, toppling the former CEO of Amazon in this battle of billionaires.

But Jeff Bezos, 57, insists: “It’s not a competition. The first one who was in space was Yuri Gagarin, and that was a long time ago,” he said. Monday on NBC, in reference to the Soviet hero of the 1961 space conquest. “It’s about building a road to space so that future generations can do incredible things there,” he said. .

Floating space colonies

The founder of Amazon created Blue Origin in 2000 with the goal, one day, of building floating space colonies, endowed with artificial gravity and where millions of people could work and live.

New Shepard, Blue Origin’s rocket, “is just the beginning,” Bob Smith, the aerospace company’s chief executive, told a press conference on Sunday. On July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the Moon, “it was an inspiration to me and an entire generation around the world,” he added. “We work hard every day to be good stewards of this heritage.”

Today the company is developing a high thrust orbital rocket called New Glenn, but also a moon landing module in the hope of securing a contract with NASA and its Artemis program, and becoming the agency’s main private partner. American space.

A few minutes in zero gravity

The New Shepard thruster, with a capsule carrying four people at its top, is scheduled to take off at 8 a.m. (1 p.m. GMT) from an isolated site in the Western Desert of Texas, 25 miles from the small town of Van Horn.

Alongside Jeff Bezos on this fully autonomous flight will feature his brother Mark, as well as aviation pioneer Wally Funk, 82, and Blue Origin’s first paying customer, 18-year-old Dutchman Oliver Daemen, who will respectively become the oldest and youngest astronaut in history. The youngster replaces the initial winner of the online auction to be Blue Origin’s first paying traveler in mid-July, which has passed his turn.

New Shepard will accelerate into space at speeds in excess of Mach 3 using an engine running on liquid hydrogen and oxygen, without carbon emissions. The capsule will then separate from its propellant, and neo-astronauts can unbuckle their belts to experience weightlessness.

The crew will spend a few minutes at an altitude of 106 km, i.e. six kilometers beyond the Karman line, the internationally recognized limit between the Earth’s atmosphere and space, and about twenty kilometers higher than Richard Branson.

“High interest”

They will be able to admire the curve of the blue planet and the deep black of the rest of the universe, from large picture windows accounting for a third of the surface of the cabin.

The thruster will finally return autonomously to a landing pad near the launch site, while the capsule will free-fall before deploying three giant parachutes, then a back-thruster to gently land in the desert after an 11-minute flight.

Blue Origin plans two more launches this year and “many more” starting in 2022. “We have had 7,500 bidders in more than 150 countries, there is obviously a great interest,” said Bob Smith, adding that the first flights “leave at a very good price”.

A third billionaire, Elon Musk and his company SpaceX, will join the space race in September with an orbital expedition made up entirely of civilians aboard his Crew Dragon rocket. SpaceX has also teamed up with the company Axiom to take visitors aboard the International Space Station.

With AFP