Jeff Bezos, chief executive officer of Inc. Visually, Blue Origin’s livestream will look much the same as most of the New Shepard test launches of years past have looked: The rocket and capsule will be sitting on a launch pad at Blue Origin’s private facilities in rural Texas - near Van Horn, which is about 120 miles east of El Paso. They’ll be going up and coming right back down, and they’ll be doing it in less time, about 11 minutes, than it takes most people to get to work. That is not what the Bezos brothers and their fellow passengers will be doing. When most people think about spaceflight, they think about an astronaut circling the Earth, floating in space, for at least a few days. They include his brother, Mark Bezos Wally Funk, an 82-year-old pilot and one of the “Mercury 13” women and an 18-year old recent high school graduate named Oliver Daemen.īezos was supposed to fly alongside a mystery bidder who won a recent Blue Origin auction by agreeing to pay $28 million for a seat on the flight, but the company announced Thursday that the person, who asked to remain anonymous for the time being, had to bow out because of “scheduling conflicts.” Daemen - whose father, Dutch investment firm founder Joes Daemen, paid for his ticket - will fly in the auction winner’s place. Though the New Shepard capsule can carry up to six people, Bezos is bringing just three others along on this inaugural journey. Here’s everything you need to know before the big event. (Shots of the interior - and Bezos’ facial expressions - won’t be released until after the flight.)ĬNN Business will also have reporters on the ground and a live blog up and running Tuesday morning ( here) that will also carry a feed of the livestream. Viewers can expect exterior shots of the rocket and capsule as it shoots up toward the cosmos. The public will be able to watch the whole thing go down on Blue Origin’s livestream - which will begin rolling at 6:30 a.m.
New Shepard has flown 15 automated test flights with no people on board, and Bezos announced in early June that he intended to be on the first-ever crewed flight, which is slated for July 20. But much like Virgin Galactic’s plane, New Shepard is designed to shuttle paying customers more than dozens of miles above the Earth’s surface for a few moments of weightlessness and panoramic views of the Earth.
Blue Origin’s New Shepard is a small, suborbital rocket that takes off vertically from a launch pad, giving a shorter yet higher-speed experience than the aerial-launched space plane created by Branson’s Virgin Galactic. Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man, is about to launch himself on a supersonic joyride to the edge of space.īezos, who founded Blue Origin in 2000 with the goal of using some of his Amazon fortune to develop rocket technology for a variety of business purposes, will take his extraterrestrial journey just nine days after fellow billionaire and rocket company founder Richard Branson took his own trip.īut Bezos’ flight, and the technology his company developed to get him there, is far different than Branson’s.
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