By Alexander Wilson-
Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin has successfully launched and returned its first-ever flight into space with six passengers.
Bezos returned The mission, called NS-19, marked the first time the company launched sixRe passengers at once and carried a crew of two guests and four customers.
The NS-19 mission brings Blue Origin to 14 people launched to space in 2021, a year that has seen a flurry of private human spaceflight activity.
Bezos leadership of his global brand has been inspired by numerous innovations and technologically innovative drives, setting very high targets.
He is acclaimed for his philanthropic deeds over the years in supporting multiple causes for the good of humanity and ambitious goals transcend those of his contemporaries the world over, and the world leading entrepreneur has continued to defy odds over the years.
The New Shepard mission, named NS-19, carried a crew of two guests and four customers: Laura Shepard Churchley, the daughter of astronaut Alan Shepard; television host and NFL star Michael Strahan; space industry executive Dylan Taylor; investor Evan Dick; venture capitalist Lane Bess and his son Cameron Bess, as per CNBC.
Launching from Blue Origin’s private base in West Texas, the spacecraft reached more than 340,000ft high, allowing the crew to experience around three minutes of weightlessness before returning to Earth.
In order to reach such a height, above Bezos’ maiden voyage, the capsule accelerated at more than three times the speed of sound. The mission lasted close to 11 minutes in total. ‘What an amazing mission from Launch Site One. Congrats to all of Team Blue on executing and supporting today’s flight,’ Blue Origin tweeted upon touchdown.
Last month, Tom Hanks revealed that Bezos invited him on a trip which cost £28m he rocket launched from Blue Origin’s private facility in West Texas, and reached above 100,000 kilometers (or more than 340,000 feet altitude) before returning to Earth safely a few minutes later. From start to finish, the launch lasted about 11 minutes. The crew experienced about three minutes of weightlessness.
New Shepard’s capsule accelerated to more than three times the speed of sound to pass beyond the 80-kilometer boundary (about 50 miles) the U.S. uses to mark the edge of space. The capsule was flown autonomously, with no human pilot, and returned under a set of parachutes to land in the Texas desert.
The New Shepard rocket booster is reusable, and returned and landed on a concrete pad near the launch site for a fifth time.
Blue Origin founder Bezos flew on the company’s originally launched a spaceflight in July on a mission that marked his company’s entrance into the sector of suborbital tourism, where it competes with Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic.
Also in the private space tourism market is Elon Musk’s SpaceX. But the company’s Crew Dragon capsule flies into orbit – many times the altitude of Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic’s spacecraft – and spends days in space, rather than minutes.
Bezos said that Blue Origin has sold nearly $100 million worth of tickets to future passengers, but has not disclosed the price of a seat on New Shepard.
Amazon.com Inc. founder Bezos is worth $196.3 billion, slightly trailing that of Elon Musk, the co-founder of publicly traded Tesla and closely held rocket company SpaceX, who added $122.3 billion to his fortune this year, pushing his net worth to $292 billion, according to the Bloomberg index.