Jeff Bezos Blasts Himself Off-Planet, Helping to Usher In a New Era of Space Tourism

Give Jeff Bezos this: When he builds a rocket, he rides the rocket, strapping his own mortal hide into a seat and test-flying what he’s developed before inviting paying passengers aboard to make the same journey. “If it’s not safe for me, it’s not safe for anyone,” Bezos said in a video segment released by Blue Origin, his private rocket company, before Tuesday morning’s first crewed launch of its New Shepard rocket on a suborbital lob shot that soared to an altitude of 106 km (66 mi.). Today, the rocket—which had previously flown 15 uncrewed missions to suborbital space—indeed proved safe not just for Bezos, but for the three other passengers aboard with him: Wally Funk, 82, an aviator and flight instructor and now the oldest person to fly in space; Mark Bezos, marketing executive and volunteer firefighter and Jeff Bezos’s brother; and Oliver Daemen, 18, a paying passenger who became the youngest person to fly in space, after his father, the founder of the Dutch hedge fund Somerset Capital Partners, purchased him the seat for an undisclosed multimillion dollar price tag. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] The flight, which lifted off from the Texas desert shortly after 8:00 a.m. CT, was, by modern-day standards, a modest affair. It essentially replicated the suborbital flight of the first American in space, Alan Shepard (after whom the rocket is named), which took place just over 60 years ago. In fact, Shepard a...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: news