WASHINGTON: Amazon’s billionaire founder Jeff Bezos has planned to fly on the first crewed space flight along with his brother Mark from his rocket company Blue Origin next month.
“Ever since I was five years old, I’ve dreamed of traveling to space. On July 20th, I will take that journey with my brother,” Bezos, who is one of the richest people in the world, said in an Instagram post.
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Amazon’s billionaire founder, who is due to step down as Amazon’s chief on July 5, will join the winner of an auction for a seat on the first space flight from Blue Origin. Bezos, fellow billionaires Elon Musk and Richard Branson have been investing billions of dollars on their rocket startups, but Bezos will be the first of the three to actually travel into space on a rocket developed by his own company.
The Blue Origin spacecraft, which is set to carry Bezos and others, has undergone 15 test flights, none of which had any passengers onboard. Blue Origin closed the first round of the auction last month and said it had received more than 5,200 bidders from 136 countries, without disclosing the highest bid from the round.
Picture perfect flight @BlueOrigin. And this vehicle has now flown to space & back six times making this a new milestone. We carried 23 payloads today including thousands of postcards from kids all over the world for @ClubforFuture. Keep them coming kids & we’ll keep flying them! pic.twitter.com/ZrjaknJh1t
— Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) December 12, 2019
The current highest bid stood at $2.8 million in the ongoing second round of auction, according to Blue Origin’s website. (www.blueorigin.com)
Its New Shepard rocket-and-capsule combo is designed to autonomously fly six passengers more than 62 miles (100 km) above Earth into suborbital space, high enough to experience a few minutes of weightlessness and see the curvature of the planet before the pressurized capsule returns to earth under parachutes.
The capsule features six observation windows and are nearly three times as tall as those on a Boeing 747 jetliner and the largest ever used in space, Blue Origin said. Bezos’s rocket startup is targeting July 20 for its first suborbital sightseeing trip, a landmark moment in a competition to usher in a new era of private commercial space travel.
