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Jeff Bezos visited the edge of space on Tuesday. He’s back now.
Amazon’s multibillion-dollar founder took off in the highly phallic-looking New Shepard spacecraft at 9:12 a.m.ET from Van Horn, Texas, and returned safely to Earth 10 minutes and 19 seconds later (approximately 19 seconds). more than the paid breaks allowed to many Whole Foods employees).
“Best day ever,” we heard Bezos say after the pod landed. The capsule traveled 66.5 miles high above the Kármán Line recognized internationally as the frontier line in space.
This is the first passenger flight for Bezo’s aerospace company, Blue Origin. He was joined on the rocket by his brother, Mark Bezos, as well as an 82-year-old pilot. An 18-year-old Dutchman whose hedge fund father offered millions for the seat also joined the trip, after the original auction winner who offered $ 28 million withdrew due to a Unspecified “calendar conflict”.
The mission was designed as a proof of concept for the New Shepard rocket, named after astronaut Alan Shepard, the first American to go into space on a suborbital flight in the early 1960s, with Bezos traveling on board. to demonstrate his faith in his safety.
“There’s that kind of a long history of self-experimentation in science. If you’re going to go, then you should go, right? And you’re not asking other people to do what you wouldn’t do yourself.” said Smithsonian Institutional space historian Margaret Weitekamp. “And in some ways it’s a vehicle he built because he’s personally excited about going into space. And so I think he would have had a hard time giving that away. seat assignment to someone other than himself. “
Bezos lost a billionaire space race to Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson, who took off in his own spaceship just over a week earlier, despite not traveling quite above the Kármán Line. .
“It certainly speaks to a historical moment when this kind of enormous wealth was only available to a very small subset of people,” Weitekamp said.
“What we are seeing is a real beginning of adventure tourism in space,” said space historian Roger Launius, author of The legacy of Apollo: perspectives on the moon landing. “I would compare it to climbing Mount Everest. There are real risks here, but it is something that rich people, or people willing to spend everything to do it, could undertake.”
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