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Love it or hate it, former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is going to space, and you can watch it happen.
Bezos takes off on July 20 at approximately 9 a.m. EDT (6 a.m. PDT), with coverage starting at 7:30 a.m. EDT (4:30 a.m. PDT) here on Live Science or BlueOrigin.com. He will board Blue Origin’s first human flight of his New Shepard rocket, which is launched from a remote location in West Texas. Online streaming will be the only way to watch the launch, according to Blue Origin; there is no public in-person viewing of the launch site available.
The flight will be the 16th launch of the New Shepard rocket, which is Blue Origin’s reusable suborbital vehicle. The rocket is designed to transport objects, astronauts and space tourists more than 100 kilometers beyond the so-called Kármán Line, the internationally recognized definition of the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and space.
Related: View photos from Blue Origin’s New Shepard mission
New Shepard’s capsule can accommodate up to six people, tucked away in reclining seats next to large rectangular windows. Accompanying Bezos will be his brother Mark Bezos and Wally Funk, 82, the first female Federal Aviation Administration inspector and the youngest graduate of the Women in Space program of the 1960s. This private program subjected female pilots to the same training and the same tests as the male astronauts in the Project Mercury program, but none of the pilots ever had the chance to go into space. NASA wouldn’t send a woman into space until almost 20 years later, when Sally Ride became the first American woman to do so.
Eighteen-year-old Oliver Daemen, winner of an auction for a seat in the flight, will also be a passenger on the spacecraft. Daemen is the son of hedge fund manager Joes Daemen. The Daemens were originally finalists in the auction for the first Blue Origin paid ticket, which cost $ 28 million. The anonymous winner, however, withdrew on July 15, citing scheduling conflicts. Blue Origin did not disclose the amount of Daemens’ bid for the ticket. Blue Origin has yet to set a price for the privilege of reaching space, although part of the company’s mission is to make space tourism a reality.
Bezos’ launch comes just over a week after another billionaire, Richard Branson of Virgin Galactic, has his astronaut wings. Branson reached 53 miles (85 km) on his company’s first crewed launch of the VSS Unity spacecraft on July 11. Rival private spaceflight company SpaceX, led by billionaire Elon Musk, has completed its first crewed flight of its Crew Dragon capsule in May 2020, and sent missions to the International Space Station.
In addition to fulfilling a dream for Bezos, the flight will break records for the oldest and youngest in space. Funk would break astronaut John Glenn’s space visit record at the age of 77, set in 1998 aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery. Daemen will break the record of Russian cosmonaut Gherman Titov, who circled the Earth at age 25 in the Vostok 2 spacecraft, in 1961.
Originally posted on Live Science.
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