![]() ![]() Future Blue Origin customers need only show up a few days before launch for some light training on their fully autonomous ride. Shepard, a military pilot, spent months preparing to fly his NASA capsule. They followed a similar trajectory as Shepard did in 1961, but the Blue Origin experience is thoroughly, well, Amazon-like. The passengers flew on a rocket called New Shepard, named for the astronaut Alan Shepard, the first American to reach space. For this crew, Blue Origin had made spaceflight feel almost as smooth as same-day shipping. The rocket was back on the launchpad, standing tall, after tearing through the atmosphere with a sonic boom. The Blue Origin rocket rose into the sky with a rumble that echoed across the West Texas desert, and about 11 minutes later, it was all over-the passenger capsule parachuted down, and the Bezos brothers, Funk, and Daemen climbed out, grinning widely. The journey was lightning-fast by spaceflight standards. ![]() By going first, Bezos wanted to prove that his vehicle is safe, and that Blue Origin is finally ready to make its 11-minute suborbital trips an experience people can buy. Before today, Bezos’s private space company, Blue Origin, had not flown its rocket with any people on board. ![]() This morning, the richest person on Earth boarded a reusable rocket he dreamed up and funded, launched to the edge of space to experience a few minutes of weightlessness, and then came back down.īezos made the trip with three people who decided they trusted him enough with their lives: his brother, Mark Bezos Wally Funk, a storied aviator and Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old fresh out of high school. VAN HORN, Texas-Jeff Bezos really flew to space. ![]()
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