The American billionaire is due to fly from a desert site in
West Texas on an 11-minute voyage to the edge of space, nine days after Briton
Richard Branson was aboard his competing space tourism company Virgin
Galactic's successful inaugural suborbital flight from New Mexico.
Branson got to space first, but Bezos is due to fly higher -
62 miles (100 km) for Blue Origin compared to 53 miles (86 km) for Virgin
Galactic - in what experts call the world's first unpiloted space flight with
an all-civilian crew.
Bezos, founder of ecommerce juggernaut Amazon.com Inc
AMZN.O, and his brother and private equity executive Mark Bezos will be joined
in the flight by two others. Pioneering female aviator Wally Funk, 82, and
recent high school graduate Oliver Daemen, 18, are set to become the oldest and
youngest people to reach space.
"I am excited, but not anxious. We'll see how I feel
when I'm strapped into my seat," Bezos said in an interview with Fox
Business Network on Monday. "... We're ready. The vehicle's ready. This
team is amazing. I feel very good about it. And I think my fellow crewmates
feel good about it, too."
Funk was one of the so-called Mercury 13 group of women who
trained to become NASA astronauts in the early 1960s but was passed over
because of her gender.
MINUTES OF WEIGHTLESSNESS
New Shepard is a 60-foot-tall (18.3-meters-tall) and fully
autonomous rocket-and-capsule combo that cannot be piloted from inside the
spacecraft. It is completely computer-flown and will have none of Blue Origin's
staff astronauts or trained personnel onboard.
In contrast, Virgin Galactic used a space plane with a pair
of pilots onboard.
New Shepard will hurtle at speeds upwards of 2,200 miles
(3,540 km) per hour to an altitude of about 62 miles (100 km), the so-called
Kármán line set by an international aeronautics body as defining the boundary
between Earth's atmosphere and space.
During the flight, the crew will unbuckle for a few minutes
of weightlessness and gaze back at the Earth's curvature through what Blue
Origin calls the largest windows ever used in space travel. Then, the capsule
falls back to Earth under parachutes, using a last-minute retro-thrust system
that expels a "pillow of air" for a soft landing at 1 mph (1.6 km/h)
in the Texas desert.
The reusable booster is due to return to the launch pad
using drag brakes and ring and wedge fins for stabilization.
Tuesday's launch marks another landmark in the
"billionaire's race" to establish a space tourism sector that Swiss
investment bank UBS estimates will reach $3 billion annually in a decade.
Another billionaire tech mogul, Elon Musk, plans to send an all-civilian crew
on an even more ambitious flight in September: a several-day orbital mission on
his Crew Dragon capsule.
On Twitter, Musk wished the Blue Origin crew "best of
luck" for the launch.
Blue Origin has not offered details on its longer-term
pricing strategy or how quickly it will ramp up the frequency of its launches.
Chief Executive Bob Smith has said the next flight is likely in September or
October. Smith said the "willingness to pay continues to be quite
high" for people interested in future flights.
The company appears to have a reservoir of future customers.
More than 6,000 people from at least 143 countries entered an auction to become
the first paying customer, though the auction winner who made a $28 million bid
ultimately dropped out of Tuesday's flight.
Bezos, who founded Blue Origin in 2000, has a net worth of $206 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He stepped down this month as Amazon CEO but remains its executive chairman.
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