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The richest man on the planet Jeff Bezos will drive his own rocket into space on Tuesday, a key moment for a fledgling industry looking to make the Last Frontier accessible to elite tourists.
Blue Origin has scheduled its first crewed mission, an 11-minute jump from West Texas across the Karman Line and back, to coincide with the 52nd anniversary of the first moon landing.
Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson made the trip on July 11, narrowly defeating the Amazon mogul in his battle for billionaires.
But Bezos, like Branson, insists it wasn’t a contest.
“There is one person who was the first person in space – his name was Yuri Gagarin – and that happened a long time ago,” he told NBC’s TODAY show Monday, referring to the milestone of the Soviet cosmonaut in 1961.
“It’s not a competition, it’s about building a road to space so that future generations can do amazing things in space,” he added.
Blue Origin’s goals are also higher: both in the altitude at which its reusable New Shepard ship will climb relative to Virgin’s space plane, but also in its ambitions.
Bezos, 57, founded Blue Origin in 2000 with the goal of someday building floating space colonies with artificial gravity where millions of people will work and live.
Today, the company is developing a heavy-lift orbital rocket called New Glenn and also a lunar lander that it hopes to contract out to NASA.
New Shepard flew 15 unmanned flights to put it to the test and test safety mechanisms, such as pulling the capsule away from the launch pad if the rocket explodes, or landing it with one less parachute.
“We’ve learned how to make a vehicle safe enough to be ready to put our own loved ones in it and send them into space,” Blue Origin CEO Bob Smith said in a briefing Sunday.
Liftoff is at 8:00 a.m. Central Time (1:00 p.m. GMT) from a remote facility in the West Texas desert called Launch Site One, about 25 miles north of the nearest town, Van Horn.
Weather conditions currently appear favorable and the event will be broadcast live on BlueOrigin.com, starting 90 minutes before launch.
– The richest, the oldest, the youngest –
Joining Bezos will be revolutionary aviator Wally Funk, who at 82 is expected to be the oldest astronaut ever, and 18-year-old Dutchman Oliver Daemen, who will become the youngest.
Jeff Bezos’ younger brother and best friend Mark completes the quartet, which runs the Bezos Family Foundation and works as a volunteer firefighter.
Notably absent is the still anonymous winner of a $ 28 million seat auction, which has had “scheduling conflicts” and will participate in a future flight.
Daemen’s father, CEO of a private equity firm, was a finalist in the tender, allowing his teenage son to become the company’s first paying client.
After take-off, New Shepard will fly into space at speeds in excess of 2,300 mph (3,700 km / h) using a liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen engine of which the only by-product is steam. of water.
The capsule separates from its booster, and when it rises high enough, the astronauts unbuckle and experience weightlessness for three to four minutes.
The spacecraft rises to 106 kilometers above sea level, allowing crew members to admire the curvature of the planet and the inky blackness of the rest of the universe.
The booster returns autonomously to a landing pad just north of its launch site, while the capsule lands on Earth with three giant parachutes, and finally a thruster, for a soft landing in the desert.
Funk, who excelled in Project Mercury 13 to train women for space but was denied the opportunity to go due to early space age sexism, said she was planning to make the most of this opportunity.
She told NBC she can’t wait to float, spin and roll with near zero gravity.
– ‘Read the room’ –
Blue Origin has remained relatively shy about what will follow.
The company says it is planning two more flights this year and then “a lot more” next year.
Analysts say a lot will depend on early successes and building a strong safety record.
Smith, the CEO, revealed on Sunday that the next launch could take place in September or October, adding that “willingness to pay continues to be quite high.”
At the same time, the sector is starting to come under criticism over the optics of very wealthy individuals soaring into space as Earth grapples with climate disasters and a coronavirus pandemic.
“Could there be a worse time for two ultra-rich rocket owners to make a quick jaunt into the dark?” Shannon Stirone wrote in an Atlantic article titled “Space Billionaires, Please Read the Room”.
ia / jh
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