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Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, flies into space Tuesday morning aboard his company’s suborbital rocket. He is accompanied by a motley crew of three other passengers: his brother Mark, aviation icon Wally Funk, 82, and Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old Dutch high school student.
The mission, called NS-16, will mark the first time Blue Origin has sent humans to space. Bezos will become the second billionaire to fly a rocket he helped fund, after Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson launched his company’s rocket plane into space on July 11. Daemen will be the youngest person to fly into space and Funk, a fiery aviator who trained as an astronaut in the 1960s but never went to space, will be the oldest .
What time is Jeff Bezos going to space?
Take-off from New Shepard is on track for 9 a.m.ET. Some Tuesday morning storms are expected to clear before that date, the company said on Sunday. The whole mission is expected to last around 10 minutes.
“The launch crew is ready, the vehicle is ready, the crew is ready and the flight director is ready,” Blue Origin NS-16 flight director Steve Lanius said on Sunday. The 16-story New Shepard will take off from Blue Origin’s rocket facilities in Van Horn, a remote town in the Western Desert of Texas. The crew capsule will detach from the New Shepard booster at an altitude of about 62 miles to spend a few minutes in microgravity weightlessness where the crew can see the curvature of the Earth. At about this time, the rocket thruster will have landed vertically not far from its starting point. The crew capsule will return a few minutes later under a set of parachutes.
The youngest passenger, Daemen, replaces the mysterious winner of Blue Origin’s New Shepard seat auction which closed at $ 28 million last month. This wealthy winner had “scheduling conflicts” and couldn’t fly, according to Blue Origin. Daemen’s father, Joes Daemen, founder and CEO of a Netherlands-based private equity firm, attended the Blue Origin auction and was set to participate in New Shepard’s next assignment, but gave way to his son.
For other launch companies like SpaceX and Virgin Galactic, the first crewed rocket launch typically includes heavily trained test pilots to monitor the crew cabin and stand by if things go wrong. But Blue Origin decided to take on its founder Bezos and its first paying client, Daemen, because its New Shepard crew pod is fully self-sufficient, requiring no human intervention during the mission.
“We know the vehicle is safe. If the vehicle isn’t safe for me, it’s not safe for anyone, ”Bezos told CNN in an interview Monday morning. Blue Origin would have had no use for test pilots on its crew capsule, said company CEO Bob Smith. “We didn’t see any value, quite frankly, in doing it in stages in this approach… Since this is an autonomous vehicle, there is really nothing for a crew member to do. He added that there were a few assessments that Blue Origin instructed some of the passengers to undertake during the flight (it’s unclear which passengers, however).
How to watch Bezos’ space flight
Blue Origin will have a live broadcast on Youtube starting at 7:30 a.m. ET Tuesday before takeoff posted on its website. Tune in before 9 a.m. ET to make sure you don’t miss out on the action. For other pre-launch mission updates, you might want to check out Bezos’ Instagram. He’s uploaded all kinds of pre-launch video reels with him and his team.
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