The richest man on the planet went into space

Kremlin relations

On July 20, 2021, the New Shepard spacecraft of Blue Origin, carrying Jeff Bezos and three other people, rose to an altitude of 107 kilometers and made a suborbital space flight, and then successfully landed.

Who flew on New Shepard?

On board was Jeff Bezos, the richest man on the planet, the founder and head of an Internet company Amazon.com, founder and owner of the aerospace company Blue Origin and owner of the publishing house The Washington Post, and his brother Mark Bezos, an American entrepreneur. Along with the brothers on board the New Shepard were 82-year-old American pilot Wally Funk and 18-year-old student from the Netherlands Oliver Damen, who received a ticket as a gift from his father, the founder of the Somerset Capital Partners investment fund Joss Damen, and became the first commercial client of Blue Origin. The pilot and the student became the oldest and the youngest person who visited space, respectively.

Flight and landing

New Shepard was launched from Blue Origin’s own launch pad in Van Horn, Texas. The departure was delayed for 12 minutes, because of this, the ship took off at 16:12 Moscow time. New Shepard designer Gary Lai said that the flight did not depend on weather conditions, so the postponement of takeoff did not affect anything. 

Forbes

Five minutes after the launch, the capsule with the pioneer passengers separated from the launch vehicle and continued its ascent. The rocket went to Earth. At 16:16, the capsule reached an altitude of 106 kilometers, overcoming the Pocket line. This is the conditional boundary between the Earth’s atmosphere and an altitude of 100 kilometers above sea level. The astronauts stayed in zero gravity for a few minutes, and then went back to Earth. At 16:20, the capsule entered the Earth’s atmosphere and opened its parachutes for landing, and at 16:22 it landed. The flight lasted a little more than 10 minutes. 

Forbes

The flight was controlled from the Blue Origin station, so there was no pilot on board the spacecraft. The New Shepard flight was monitored by technical staff, using cameras to determine the condition of the ship. A live broadcast was also conducted through them, which can be viewed on YouTube. 

Jeff Bezos, who became the second person in the world to go into space on his own ship, was overtaken by billionaire Richard Branson, who flew into space on July 11. Thus, in two weeks, two people have already made a flight into space on their own spacecraft.