Why did Jeff Bezos go into space and return within a few minutes?

New York (CNN Business) – Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, went to space and back this Tuesday morning on an 11-minute supersonic journey aboard the rocket and capsule system developed by his space company, Blue origin.Along with the billionaire were his brother, Mark Bezos; Wally funk, an 82-year-old pilot and one of the “Mercury 13” who trained for space in the 20th century but never flew; and an 18-year-old recent high school graduate named Oliver Daemen who was Blue Origin’s first paying customer and whose father, an investor, bought his ticket.

Funk and Daemen became the oldest and youngest people, respectively, to have traveled into space. And this flight marked the first crewed mission for Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital space tourism rocket, which the company plans to use to take wealthy thrill seekers on high-altitude pleasure trips in the months and years to come.

The four passengers boarded the New Shepard capsule Tuesday at the Blue Origin launch site in rural West Texas just before the rocket fired its engines at 8:12 a.m. from the center), causing the vehicle to exceed the speed of sound and rise more than 105 kilometers above the desert landscape, reaching an altitude of 107 kilometers. At the highest point of the flight path, the passengers were weightless for about three minutes and were allowed to lift off their seats to float and take in panoramic views of Earth and the cosmos.

The launch was visible to reporters on the ground, and the rocket soared through the virtually cloudless Texas sky with a blooming wake. The bright glow from the rocket engine looked almost like a star or planet as it rose into the sky. On the Blue Origin live stream, Bezos and the crew could be heard cheering as they moved through the capsule during the microgravity portion of the flight.

“It’s dark up here, wow!” Funk heard himself say.

Upon landing, Bezos declared that it had been “the best day of all” in his communications control.

What is Bezos’s plan?

Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000, just six years after founding Amazon, with the goal of making space flight more affordable and accessible. Some of his industry rivals, notably Elon Musk and Richard Branson, started their space ventures around the same time.

Although Bezos’ extraterrestrial ambitions are lofty and involve the creation of orbital space stations in which people live and work, the New Shepard suborbital vehicle is the first fully operational piece of space hardware the company has developed.

And just like they did Branson and Virgin Galactic just nine days ago, Bezos decided to be one of the first people to ride the space tourism craft as a show of confidence in the safety of the vehicle.

“We know the vehicle is safe,” Bezos told CNN Business’ Rachel Crane on Monday. “If it’s not safe for me, then it’s not safe for anyone.”

Who will be able to fly in the New Shepard?

So far, the reservations have been offered only to participants in an auction that Blue Origin concluded last month. The winner, a mysterious stakeholder who agreed to pay $ 28 million for a ticket, was expected to be on Tuesday’s spaceflight, although the person made the surprise decision to reschedule for a later mission due to “scheduling conflicts,” according to the company.

Blue Origin says it plans to fly another two passenger flights with the New Shepard this year. But the company has not given any indication of whether it will set a public price for the tickets, nor has it revealed how much Daemen, the 18-year-old Dutchman who flew with Bezos, had to pay for his seat. The company has remained on the sidelines of numerous requests for additional information on ticket prices.

But the company says the auction gave a strong indication that a lot of people are eager to go: 7,600 people from 159 countries signed up to participate in the bidding war.

What does this all mean?

Billionaires in space have sparked many reactions, including one recent online petition that has gathered more than 162,000 signatures demanding that Bezos never return to Earth.

Bezos, who is worth about $ 200 billion, has financed the company almost exclusively out of his own pocket. And the repeated promises of benevolence and benefit to a devastated Earth have critics concerned that the ultra-rich see outer space as their own personal escape hatch.

Still, Blue Origin and other billionaire-backed space companies talk a lot about their technologies paving the way for a “democratization” of space in which ordinary people, and not just government-trained astronauts, can experience the thrill of space flight. These first suborbital space tourism flights will be prohibitive for the vast majority of people, and that is not expected to change anytime soon.

However, this is how Blue Origin describes its long-term vision:

“Blue Origin was founded by Jeff Bezos with the vision of making possible a future in which millions of people live and work in space for the benefit of the Earth. To preserve the Earth, Blue Origin believes that humanity will have to expand, explore , find new energy and material resources, and move the industries that stress the Earth into space. Blue Origin is working on this today by developing partially and fully reusable launch vehicles that are safe, low-cost, and serve everyone’s needs. civil, commercial and defense clients, “the company said in a press release.

It is still early, of course. The New Shepard rocket and capsule system is suborbital, which means that it does not accumulate enough energy to stay in space for more than a couple of minutes. But the company is working on a much larger rocket for that purpose, called the New Glenn, and on a lunar lander that it hopes will be used to support NASA missions.

Bezos has also spoken in the past of the O’Neill colonies, a concept of rotating space stations that can mimic Earth’s gravity for passengers, serving as a possible habitat for future inhabitants of space.

Whose space stations will they be? And will the passengers be employees or tourists? Will space travel, if necessary to save humanity, only be available to those who can afford it? And is Bezos’ time and money better spent trying to solve earthly problems than trying to escape from them?

We do not know. There are a lot of unanswered questions and fierce debates.

CNN’s Rachel Crane asked Bezos about the criticism Monday.

“They are largely right,” Bezos said of critics who say billionaires should focus their energy, and money, on issues closer to home. “We have to do both. We have a lot of problems here and now on Earth and we have to work on them, and we always have to look to the future. We have always done it as a species, as a civilization.”