![]() "All right, see if you can catch this in your mouth." Daemen did just that, prompting cheers in the cabin. Tossing candy and ping pong balls back and forth, doing somersaults and marveling at the view, the crew cavorted like school kids, clearly thrilled by the experience. ![]() A few seconds later, at an altitude of about 45 miles, the booster's company-designed BE-3 main engine shut down and the crew capsule was released to fly on its own.Ĭoasting upward along an unpowered ballistic trajectory, Bezos and his crewmates enjoyed about three minutes of weightlessness, unstrapping, floating about the cabin and taking in the view through the largest windows ever built into a spacecraft. In a little more than two minutes, the spacecraft was shooting skyward at three times the speed of sound, dwindling to a blur more than 30 miles up. Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket launches on July 20, 2021, carrying passengers Jeff Bezos, founder of Blue Origin and Amazon, his brother Mark Bezos, Oliver Daemen and Wally Funk. EDT.Ĭlimbing straight up atop 110,000 pounds of push, the rocket rapidly accelerated as it consumed its load of supercold liquid oxygen and hydrogen propellants, pushing the passengers back in their recliner-style seats with about three times the normal force of gravity. The crew lifted off from the company's West Texas launch site at 9:12 a.m. ![]() "Best day ever!" an elated Bezos said upon landing.Ĭompeting head to head with fellow billionaire Richard Branson, who flew into space aboard his Virgin Galactic rocketplane July 11, Bezos blasted off with his brother Mark and two history-making passengers: 82-year-old aviation pioneer Wally Funk, the oldest person to fly in space, and Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old Dutch student who is the youngest ever to fly in space.įunk, who was barred from NASA's initially all-male astronaut corps in the 1960s, finally got her chance to prove the naysayers wrong, realizing a lifelong dream. His solution to those existential threats, according to Stone's book, was to send civilization to space.Riding his own rocket, Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos streaked into space Tuesday on a thrilling 10-minute up-and-down flight, a high-tech joyride that sets the stage for the start of commercial passenger service later this year. When Bezos became valedictorian of his senior class in 1982, he delivered a speech about overpopulation and pollution. He attended a space initiative for high schoolers at NASA's campus in Hunstville, Alabama, and later started a summer camp for elementary school students that had a heavy emphasis on science - including interstellar travel and space colonies, according to Wired. Bezos used his high school valedictorian speech to talk about colonizing spaceīy the time he was in high school in South Florida, Bezos had told his friends that he wanted to be a space entrepreneur, and already had big plans to make space travel a part of his career plans, according to a 1999 Wired profile. There, he would watch Apollo launches and read science fiction books from the library, according to Stone's book. The lore around Bezos' childhood is well-known by this point: Every summer, he would travel to the South Texas ranch belonging to his grandfather, Lawrence Preston Gise.Īccording to Brad Stone's book, "Amazon Unbound," Gise had spent the 1950s and 1960s working on space technology and missile defense systems for the Atomic Energy Commission, a federal agency that was created in 1946 to manage the use of nuclear energy for both civilian and military applications.īezos, it seems, developed his passion for space during those summers with his grandfather. Bezos' interest in space stems from his maternal grandfather Here's where Bezos' passion for space began. On Tuesday, Bezos will embark on his own 11-minute trip outside of the Earth's gravitational pull, decades after he first became obsessed with space travel. The company has grown slowly over the years, but in 2015, it completed a remarkable feat, one Bezos will soon attempt: Flying the New Shepard rocket 62 miles above Earth and landing it safely on the ground. It often indicates a user profile.īezos founded Blue Origin in 2000 with the goal of democratizing human spaceflight. ![]() Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |