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New glenn goes vertical, fly to space on new shepard, nasa selects blue origin, reusable rocket engines.

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Bezos Launches to Space, Aiming to Reignite His Rocket Company’s Ambitions

The Amazon founder and three others lifted off in Blue Origin’s New Shepard spacecraft, fulfilling a goal more than 20 years in the making.

Highlights From Blue Origin’s Spaceflight

Blue origin’s first flight to space with humans onboard included the billionaire jeff bezos, his brother mark bezos, wally funk and oliver daemen. the team traveled more than 60 miles above earth..

“There’s Oliver on the left, Jeff Bezos on the right. We are about to go to space, everybody.” “Command engine start — two, one, ignition. We have liftoff. The Shepard has cleared the tower.” And New Shepard has cleared the tower, on her way to space with our first human crew. And booster touchdown, welcome back New Shepard.” “First up, your booster has landed.” “Booster landed.” “Our rocket went over Mach 3. And now they’re coming, floating back down at just about 15 or 16 miles an hour. What a flight.” “Welcome back to Earth. Congratulations to all of you. All of you.” [cheering] “Welcome back, astronauts.”

By Kenneth Chang

VAN HORN, Texas — Jeff Bezos, the richest human in the world, went to space on Tuesday. It was a brief jaunt — rising more than 65 miles into the sky above West Texas — in a spacecraft that was built by Mr. Bezos’ rocket company, Blue Origin .

While Mr. Bezos was beaten to space last week by Richard Branson, the British entrepreneur who flew in a rocket plane from his company Virgin Galactic, some analysts consider Blue Origin , founded by Mr. Bezos more than 20 years ago, to be a more significant contender in the future space economy. The company has ambitions of a scale far beyond short flights for space tourists, and it is backed by the entrepreneur who made Amazon into an economic powerhouse.

Lori Garver, who served as deputy administrator of NASA during the Obama administration, said that Mr. Bezos “has a huge, long-term vision that is multigenerational.” She added that his intent for Blue Origin was to “compete for even higher stakes” in the growing business of space.

In 2017, Mr. Bezos announced that he would sell $1 billion of Amazon stock a year to fund the space venture, and Blue Origin has already pursued a range of business opportunities, such as trying to win contracts for a moon lander for NASA astronauts as well as launching satellites for the Department of Defense on large reusable rockets.

In recent years before he stepped down as chief executive of Amazon, Mr. Bezos would typically spend a day a week — usually Wednesdays — focused on Blue Origin. That Mr. Bezos himself was seated in the capsule for Tuesday’s space trip makes plain that he is putting spaceflight at the top of his spending list.

“The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel,” he said a few years ago, couching his investment as a form of philanthropy.

Mr. Bezos has described a vision of humanity’s future that is influenced by the proposals of Gerard K. O’Neill, a Princeton physicist. In the 1970s, Dr. O’Neill proposed giant cylinder-shape space colonies that in great enough numbers would support far more people and industry than are possible on Earth.

“The solar system can easily support a trillion humans,” Mr. Bezos said. “If we had a trillion humans, we would have a thousand Einsteins and a thousand Mozarts and unlimited, for all practical purposes, resources and solar power.”

By contrast, Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, has focused on the idea of settling Mars. Getting to Mars is an easier task than building one of O’Neill’s colonies, but making cold and airless Mars hospitable to human civilization would be an enormous undertaking.

And despite Tuesday’s successful flight, Blue Origin has much progress to make. To have the impact on humanity’s future that Mr. Bezos describes, Blue Origin will need much more than the small New Shepard vehicle that Mr. Bezos and three other passengers flew to the edge of space on Tuesday.

Although private enterprise has always worked with governments on space travel, it is only in recent decades that private companies have started seeking to make business opportunities from tourist spaceflight.

Blue Origin’s accomplishments pale next to the rocket company led by another of the world’s richest people: SpaceX, which Mr. Musk founded a couple of years after Blue Origin started.

SpaceX is already a behemoth in the space business. It regularly takes NASA astronauts and cargo to the International Space Station, it has already deployed more than 1,500 satellites in its Starlink constellation to provide internet service everywhere, and it is developing a gargantuan rocket called Starship for missions for Mars and elsewhere.

By contrast, Blue Origin’s forthcoming projects, at least in the near future, do not seem poised to upend the space industry the way SpaceX has.

The larger reusable rocket for launching satellites that Mr. Bezos’ company is working on, New Glenn, is still more than a year away, and efforts to win major government contracts like launching Department of Defense satellites have so far come up empty. A lunar lander that Blue Origin hopes NASA will someday use to carry astronauts was not selected, at least for the moment, because NASA said it had money for only one design — SpaceX’s.

Blue Origin’s mascot is the tortoise. As in the fable “The Tortoise and the Hare,” perhaps with steady, constant effort, Blue Origin can catch up.

Ms. Garver recalled Mr. Bezos going to Washington to meet with her and Charles Bolden, the NASA administrator. At the time, Blue Origin was an enigma.

“We were thrilled to hear of his plan,” she said. “It was: ‘I’m here because I’m investing in a space company. I am prepared to invest a lot over the long term. And my goals are very aligned with NASA. So if I can be of help in any way, let’s work together.’”

Blue Origin was working on a capsule that could carry astronauts to the International Space Station, and it won a modest $25.6 million development contract from NASA. But work on that vehicle stalled, and Blue Origin dropped out of the competition for the contracts that ultimately went to Boeing and SpaceX.

“Slow and steady was slower than anybody hoped,” Ms. Garver said.

But the comparisons to SpaceX’s extraordinary successes are somewhat unfair, she said.

“We are really spoiled by SpaceX right now,” Ms. Garver said.

Even if Blue Origin has not yet lived up to its lofty vision, more companies will mean more competition. “I’m not really as disappointed as some people at their pace,” Ms. Garver said. “I feel they’ll get there. We need competition.”

Laura Seward Forczyk, founder of the aerospace consulting firm Astralytical, was also positive. “Although their progress has been slow, they haven’t had any large failures that indicate to me that they’re at risk,” she said. “Blue Origin is still finding its way forward.”

While Blue Origin awaits the path that Mr. Bezos will lead it down, Tuesday’s flight was a milestone, the first flight from the company to carry people to space, even though it did not enter orbit.

At 8:11 a.m. Central time, the stubby rocket and capsule, named New Shepard after Alan Shepard, the first American in space, rose from the company’s launch site in Van Horn, a thin jet of fire and exhaust streaming from the rocket’s engine.

Over the past six years, Blue Origin has conducted 15 successful test flights without people aboard, and engineers deemed that New Shepard, which flies with no pilot, was finally ready for passengers — their boss included.

The other three passengers were Mr. Bezos’ brother, Mark; Oliver Daemen, a Dutch student who was Blue Origin’s first paying passenger; and Mary Wallace Funk, a pilot who in the 1960s was among a group of women who passed the same rigorous astronaut selection criteria employed by NASA but who, until Tuesday, never had the chance to board a rocket.

At 18, Mr. Daemen was the youngest person ever to go to space. At 82, Ms. Funk, who goes by Wally, was the oldest.

“I want to thank you, sweetheart,” Ms. Funk said to Jeff Bezos during a news conference. “I’ve been waiting a long time.”

Video Shows Inside the Blue Origin Flight to Space

The blue origin crew included four passengers who had fun during the short flight, playing with skittles and experimenting with gravity..

“You just have to wait for it. Who wants a Skittle?” “Oh yeah, throw me one.” “See if you can catch this in your mouth.” Group: “Yeah!” “Well done. Here, toss me one.” “Here, catch.” “Oh, yeah.” “Whoo hoo!” “Has it been everything you thought it would be?” “Fantastic!” “Here, look — Oliver.”

Once the booster had used up its propellant, the capsule detached from the rocket at an altitude of about 47 miles. Both pieces continued to coast upward to 66.5 miles, passing the 62-mile boundary often considered to be the beginning of outer space.

The passengers unbuckled and floated around the capsule, somersaulting and tossing Ping-Pong balls and Skittles candy as they experienced about four minutes of free fall.

The booster landed vertically near the launch site, similar to SpaceX’s rival reusable Falcon 9 rocket. The capsule then descended under parachutes until it gently set down in a puff of dust.

Ten minutes and 10 seconds after launch, it was over. A few minutes later, the four emerged euphorically from the capsule, greeted with hugs from friends and family.

Two more passenger-carrying flights are scheduled for this year with the company hoping to speed the pace of operations next year. Blue Origin has declined to say how much the early customers are paying or how many have signed up. However, Mr. Bezos said: “We’re approaching $100 million in private sales already. And the demand is very, very high.”

In addition to the high cost of tickets to ride on New Shepard, Mr. Bezos also called attention to the vast wealth at his disposal when he remarked on how it was possible for him to finance Blue Origin in the first place.

“I also want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer,” Mr. Bezos said in a news conference after the flight, “because you guys paid for all of this.”

That remark prompted a number of scornful responses from critics. Perhaps to blunt attacks from those who say he is just using his wealth create diversions for the wealthy, Mr. Bezos announced that he had created a prize for individual he said exemplified acts of both civility and courage.

The award offered $100 million each to two people — Van Jones, the CNN political commentator, and José Andrés, the chef and restaurateur — to be donated to charitable causes of each recipient’s choosing.

Whatever Blue Origin’s future will be, Mr. Bezos remained pleased on Tuesday. Would he make another trip?

“Hell yes,” he said. “How fast can you refuel that thing? Let’s go.”

Karen Weise and Neil Vigdor contributed reporting.

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Kenneth Chang has been at The Times since 2000, writing about physics, geology, chemistry, and the planets. Before becoming a science writer, he was a graduate student whose research involved the control of chaos. More about Kenneth Chang

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Welcome to the age of billionaire joyrides to space

Blue Origin launched its first flight with humans aboard, including billionaire Jeff Bezos.

by Rebecca Heilweil

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has flown straight to the border of space. The billionaire — carried in a rocket built by his spaceflight company Blue Origin and accompanied by three fellow space tourists — joins a small but growing number of people who have traveled to space but aren’t professionally trained astronauts.

Bezos’s trip is a big deal for Blue Origin — although its New Shepard rocket, named after the first American to visit space, Alan Shepard , has already had 15 successful test flights . Tuesday is the first time the rocket carried humans to space. But more importantly, the journey signals that the era of civilian space tourism is officially here — or at least, it is for the very wealthy.

On July 11, Richard Branson, fellow billionaire and the founder of space tourism company Virgin Galactic, beat Bezos to the border of space when he flew there on a 90-minute trip with five other passengers on one of his company’s planes.

Bezos’s and Branson’s space travel is a reminder that space is no longer only a place where national governments set out to explore and to learn more about the universe, but a terrain that private businesses are capitalizing on. Bezos has invested billions of his own money into Blue Origin, and his company recently auctioned a ticket to space on one of its rockets for $28 million.

At a pre-launch mission briefing on Sunday, Blue Origin’s director of astronaut sales Ariane Cornell said two more flights were anticipated this year and that the company had “already built a robust pipeline of customers that are interested.”Analysts at the investment banking firm Canaccord Genuity have estimated that tourism to suborbital space could be an $8 billion industry by the end of the decade.

Blue Origin hosted a live feed on its website.

Tuesday’s flight path

Around 9:15 am ET on July 20, Blue Origin’s rocket took off from a remote desert in West Texas. At liftoff, the vehicle launched toward space, carrying a six-seat capsule containing Bezos and the other passengers, pushed upward by a powerful, 60-foot-tall booster rocket.

To reach space, New Shepard moves incredibly quickly: faster than Mach 3 , or more than three times the speed of sound. A few minutes into the flight, the capsule separated from the booster, which then headed back toward Earth and landed vertically (ensuring it’s reusable for future flights).

Meanwhile, Blue Origin’s capsule headed to the apex of its flight path and crossed the Kármán line, the internationally recognized border between Earth’s atmosphere and space. That’s about 62 miles above the Earth’s surface, about 10 miles higher than Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic flight earlier this month . Like that flight, those traveling on Blue Origin’s New Shepard were given a stunning view of Earth and had the chance to experience weightlessness.

“They’re obviously going a little bit higher, a little bit faster, but they’re still only going to have just a few minutes of low microgravity experience before coming right back down,” Wendy Whitman Cobb, a professor at the US Air Force’s School of Air and Space Studies, told Recode. ”There’s also the notion of what’s called the ‘overview effect.’ That’s when astronauts do get up into space and are high enough to see the Earth for what it is, and it sort of changes how they view things on Earth.”

After reaching the apex of the flight, the capsule headed back into Earth’s atmosphere, eventually deploying parachutes to land. Overall, the whole trip clocked in at just 10 to 15 minutes .

Blue Origin’s passengers are making history

Jeff Bezos, who founded Blue Origin back in 2000, is fulfilling his lifelong dream of traveling to space . “If you see the Earth from space, it changes you. It changes your relationship with this planet, with humanity,” explained the billionaire in a video announcing the flight in June . “It’s a big deal for me.”

Bezos was joined by his brother, firefighter and charity executive Mark Bezos. The flight also carried both the oldest and youngest people to ever visit space: Wally Funk , an 82-year-old American aviator, and Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old Dutch teenager. Funk, the Federal Aviation Administration’s first female flight inspector, was one of the first women to train to become a NASA astronaut, but was ultimately denied the chance to travel to space because of her gender. Daemen is joining the flight as Blue Origin’s first paying customer; he’s taking the place of a still-unnamed bidder who paid $28 million for a seat (that person reportedly had a scheduling conflict and will travel on a later flight ).

While Blue Origin has made history in several ways, the flight is also a reminder that many people see space tourism, at least for the foreseeable future, as primarily funded by and for the very rich — and that it won’t do much to advance science and our understanding of space.

“The experience of a few hyper-wealthy amateurs paying $28 million to vomit for 15 minutes probably won’t bring many average people closer to spaceflight or change their impression of it,” Matthew Hersch, a historian of technology at Harvard, told Recode in an email. “Compared to NASA’s space vehicles, they are clever amusement park rides with minimal utility, intended to support a tourism business that has never been part of NASA’s charter.”

In fact, Bezos and Blue Origin are not the only private ventures looking to cash in on joyrides to space. Virgin Galactic, fresh off Branson’s flight, is already moving ahead with its plans to test and modify its planes for eventual commercial service . And this fall, SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk, is sending its rocket to space too, with billionaire Jared Isaacman aboard . At the same time, NASA is also bringing these companies along for more ambitious ventures, including hiring SpaceX to transport its astronauts to the International Space Station.

“Showing customers [and] showing the world that they have enough confidence in their system to get on board and experience it themselves ... is a big part of this,” Whitman Cobb, of the Air Force School, told Recode. “Part of it is also ego.”

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Jeff Bezos hails ‘best day ever’ after successful Blue Origin space flight

• Suborbital flight on New Shepard rocket lasted 11 minutes
• Bezos blasted for traveling to space as Amazon workers toil

The Amazon founder Jeff Bezos hailed “the best day ever” after completing his pioneering foray into space on Tuesday with three crewmates, among them his brother Mark.

The billionaire’s New Shepard rocket and capsule touched down in the Texas desert after a suborbital flight that lasted a mere 11 minutes, but set several records for his Blue Origin space company, including the oldest and youngest humans to fly into space.

Wally Funk, an 82-year-old female aviation pioneer who trained as an astronaut in the 1960s, flew as Bezos’s guest, while Oliver Daemen, 18, a student from the Netherlands and son of a private enquiry firm’s chief executive, was Blue Origin’s first paying customer.

The world’s richest man with an estimated net worth of $206bn, Bezos, 57, sprayed champagne and shouted his enjoyment after the successful landing of New Shepard’s first crewed mission following 15 uncrewed test flights.

“It was the best day ever,” Bezos said after emerging from the capsule, adding that he felt “unbelievably good” and that his colleagues were “a very happy crew”.

The tycoon, however, has also attracted criticism for putting his fortune into space tourism amid concerns over working conditions at Amazon, and “aggressive” tax avoidance .

In recent years, Bezos, who stood down as Amazon chief executive this month to concentrate on the space company he founded in 2000, has sold about $1bn in Amazon stock annually to fund Blue Origin.

In a post-flight press conference on Tuesday, Bezos said the venture had reinforced his commitment to tackling the climate crisis, and using New Shepard as a stepping stone towards colonising space for the benefit of Earth.

“The whole point of doing this is to practice,” said Bezos, who announced in February that he was donating $10bn to efforts to “ preserve and protect the natural world ”.

“Every time we fly this tourism mission we’re practicing flying the second stage of New Glenn,” he added, referring to Blue Origin’s planned reusable heavy-lift launch vehicle , which is central to his vision of ultimately moving industry off the planet.

“We’re going to build a road to space so our kids, and their kids, can build the future. This is not about escaping Earth … this is the only good planet in the solar system and we have to take care of it. When you go to space and see how fragile it is you want to take care of it even more.”

Bezos, who donated the proceeds from the New Shepard seat auction to Blue Origin’s Club for the Future to encourage young people to pursue careers in space and science, also announced two $100m “ Courage and Civility” awards for recipients to donate to charities of their choice.

Asked if he would fly into space again, Bezos was unequivocal.

“Hell yes,” he said. “How fast can you refuel that thing? Let’s go.”

The firm intends to run regular space tourism flights for commercial passengers.

New Shepard, named as a tribute to Alan Shepard, the first American in Space in 1961, blasted off into a clear blue sky from the launchpad in Van Horn, Texas, at 8.12am local time, the first of three scheduled flights this year, on the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.

The crew capsule successfully separated from its rocket booster shortly before reaching the 62-mile altitude Kármán Line , the internationally accepted boundary of space, after about three minutes of flight.

The crew experienced about three to four minutes of weightlessness during which the spacecraft reached the top of its flight path at 66.5 miles, more than 10 miles higher than the British billionaire Sir Richard Branson’s flight to the edge of space aboard Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity nine days earlier.

Audio from the capsule on Blue Origin’s live webcast of the flight captured the crew members shouting in excitement as they floated around the spacecraft. Video was later released.

After re-entering Earth’s atmosphere, the capsule glided to a gentle landing on parachutes, minutes after the reusable booster made a powered landing on a nearby pad.

Mark Bezos assumed the moniker “Astronaut Demo”, for the flight to distinguish him from his brother, Astronaut Bezos. Their sister Christina, director of the family foundation, sent her siblings a message before the flight, reminding them how they would pretend to be Star Trek characters as children.

“As you buckle in, I’m reminded of when Jeff was Captain Kirk, Mark, you were Sulu, and I took the role of Uhura, we would battle Klingons while firing torpedoes, all the while dodging in and out of traffic and praying that we make it to our destination safely,” she said.

“Mark, be prepared to fire those torpedoes in order to do so. Now, get your asses back down here so I can give you a big hug. We love you, and Godspeed New Shepard.”

Blue Origin has opened sales for space tourism flights but has not set a price or revealed how much Daemen paid. The winning bid in a June auction for the first seat was $28m (£20m), the winner pulling out of Tuesday’s flight because of a “scheduling conflict”.

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Jeff Bezos rides on company's 1st passenger flight to space and back

'best day ever,' bezos said after the capsule touched down on the desert floor.

Jeff Bezos makes historic spaceflight with all-civilian crew

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Jeff Bezos blasted into space Tuesday on his rocket company's first flight with people on board, becoming the second billionaire in just over a week to ride his own spacecraft.

The Amazon founder was accompanied by a hand-picked group: his brother, an 18-year-old from the Netherlands and an 82-year-old aviation pioneer from Texas — the youngest and oldest to ever fly in space.

"Best day ever!" Bezos said after the capsule touched down on the desert floor at the end of the 10-minute flight.

Named after America's first astronaut, Alan Shepard, the Blue Origin rocket soared from remote West Texas on the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, a date chosen by Bezos for its historical significance. He held fast to it, even as Virgin Galactic's Richard Branson pushed up his own flight from New Mexico in the race for space tourist dollars and beat him by nine days .

Unlike Branson's piloted rocket plane, Bezos's capsule was completely automated and required no official staff on board for the up-and-down flight.

Blue Origin reached an altitude of about 66 miles (106 kilometers), more than 10 miles (16 kilometers) higher than Branson's July 11 ride. The 60-foot (18-metre) booster accelerated to Mach 3 or three times the speed of sound to get the capsule high enough, before separating and landing upright.

During their several minutes of weightlessness, video from inside the capsule showed the four floating, doing somersaults, tossing Skittles candies and throwing balls. Cheering, whooping and exclamations of "wow" could be heard. The capsule landed under parachutes, with Bezos and his guests briefly experiencing nearly six times the force of gravity, or 6 Gs, on the way back.

WATCH | Blue Origin rocket passengers goof off in space:

Blue Origin rocket passengers goof off in space

Led by Bezos, they climbed out of the capsule after touchdown with wide grins, embracing parents, partners and children, then popped open bottles of sparkling wine, spraying one another.

"My expectations were high and they were dramatically exceeded," Bezos said later.

Their flight lasted 10 minutes and 10 seconds — five minutes shy of Alan Shepard's Freedom 7 flight in 1961 . Shepard's daughters, Laura and Julie, were introduced at a news conference a few hours later.

Sharing Bezos's dream-come-true adventure was Wally Funk, from the Dallas area, one of 13 female pilots who went through the same tests as NASA's all-male astronaut corps in the early 1960s but never made it into space.

"I've been waiting a long time to finally get it up there," Funk said after the flight.

"I want to go again — fast," she added.

Joining them on the ultimate joyride was the company's first paying customer, Oliver Daemen, a last-minute fill-in for the mystery winner of a $28 million US auction who opted for a later flight. The Dutch teen's father took part in the auction and agreed on a lower undisclosed price last week when Blue Origin offered his son the vacated seat.

Among the items brought on the flight: a pair of aviator Amelia Earhart's goggles and a piece of fabric from the original Wright Flyer.

"I got goosebumps," said Angel Herrera of El Paso, who watched the launch from inside Van Horn High School, about 40 kilometres away. "The hair on the back of my neck stood up, just witnessing history."

WATCH | A replay of the entire launch:

Billionaire Jeff Bezos blasts off on space travel company's first flight

How to get on the next two 2021 flights.

Blue Origin — founded by Bezos in 2000 in Kent, Wash., near Amazon's Seattle headquarters — has yet to open ticket sales to the public or reveal the price. For now, it's booking auction bidders. Two more passenger flights are planned by year's end, said Blue Origin CEO Bob Smith.

The recycled rocket and capsule that carried up Tuesday's passengers were used on the last two space demos, according to company officials.

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Virgin Galactic already has more than 600 reservations at $250,000 US apiece. Founded by Branson in 2004, the company has sent crew into space four times and plans two more test flights from New Mexico before launching customers next year.

Blue Origin's approach was slower and more deliberate. After 15 successful unoccupied test flights to space since 2015, Bezos finally declared it was time to put people on board. The Federal Aviation Administration agreed last week, approving the commercial space licence.

Remarkable passengers for a space flight

Bezos, 57, who also owns The Washington Post, claimed the first seat. The next went to his 50-year-old brother, Mark Bezos, an investor and volunteer firefighter, then Funk and Daemen. They spent two days together in training.

University of Chicago space historian Jordan Bimm said the passenger makeup is truly remarkable. Imagine if the head of NASA decided he wanted to launch in 1961 instead of Alan Shepard on the first U.S. spaceflight, he said in an email.

"That would have been unthinkable!" Bimm said. ""It shows just how much the idea of who and what space is for has changed in the last 60 years."

Bezos stepped down earlier this month as Amazon's CEO and just last week donated $200 million US to renovate the National Air and Space Museum. Most of the $28 million US from the auction has been distributed to space advocacy and education groups, with the rest benefiting Blue Origin's Club for the Future, its own education effort.

Fewer than 600 people have reached the edge of space or beyond. Until Tuesday, the youngest was 25-year-old Soviet cosmonaut Gherman Titov and the oldest at 77 was Mercury-turned-shuttle astronaut John Glenn.

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Both Bezos and Branson want to drastically increase those overall numbers, as does SpaceX's Elon Musk, who's skipping brief space hops and sending his private clients straight to orbit for tens of millions apiece, with the first flight coming up in September.

Despite appearances, Bezos and Branson insist they weren't trying to outdo each other by strapping in themselves. Bezos noted this week that only one person can lay claim to being first in space: Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who rocketed into orbit on April 12, 1961.

"This isn't a competition; this is about building a road to space so that future generations can do incredible things in space," he said on NBC's Today .

Blue Origin is working on a massive rocket, New Glenn, to put payloads and people into orbit from Cape Canaveral, Fla. The company also wants to put astronauts back on the moon with its proposed lunar lander Blue Moon; it's challenging NASA's sole contract award to SpaceX.

Included in the many people that Bezos thanked Tuesday was "every Amazon employee, and every Amazon customer. Because you guys paid for all this." Bezos has said he finances the rocket company by selling $1 billion in Amazon stock each year.

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• Boeing & Aerospace

Ready to rocket, Jeff Bezos aims to open up space tourism

When Kent-based Blue Origin on Tuesday rockets Jeff Bezos upward on its first mission carrying humans into space, the wealthiest man on the planet will be blazing the trail of a newly hot recreation for the very rich: space tourism.

Bezos, creator of Amazon, founder and bankroller of Blue Origin, follows on the tail of the heavily marketed trip to space just days earlier by fellow billionaire Richard Branson in a Virgin Galactic spaceplane .

On Blue Origin’s rockets, tickets for its 11-minute thrill ride are initially expected to cost in excess of $300,000 per seat.

If an ephemeral experience with just three minutes of weightlessness seems a frivolous pursuit for people with money to burn, that’s not how Bezos sees it.

For him, space tourism is a way to advance and fund the technologies needed for his long-term ambitions: to make possible, in some far-off future, a sustainable space ecosystem where millions of people will live and work.

To achieve that far-reaching goal, he’s built at Blue Origin a company culture reflective of the Silicon Valley venture capital values that created Amazon and the other tech giants: an unshakable belief that technology linked with the capitalist profit motive will change the world.

Blue Origin engineer Gary Lai, one of the company’s first 20 employees and lead designer of the 60-foot-tall New Shepard reusable rocket that will boost Bezos into space, outlined in an interview the company’s rationale for space tourism.

“Even if the ticket prices are high, there are still a lot of high-net-worth individuals in the world … So there is a very healthy potential to fly very often,” he said. In turn, “Flying more and more will allow us to perfect those techniques, which will benefit all programs at Blue Origin.”

Bezos, on a 2016 press tour of Blue Origin’s Kent headquarters , likewise compared space tourism to the early aviators who flew biplanes around the U.S.

“The barnstormers who went around and landed in small towns and gave people rides up in the air, that was entertainment — but it really advanced aviation,” he said.

“You don’t get great at anything you do only 12 times a year,” Bezos said then, referring to the low frequency of NASA’s big space launches. “With the tourism mission, we can fly hundreds of times a year. That will be so much practice.”

For him and for Blue Origin, the New Shepard rocket — named after the first American to go to space, Alan Shepard — is the precursor to bolder steps later: putting rockets into orbit around the Earth, sending them to the moon and beyond.

Bezos sees space tourism on New Shepard as a steppingstone to that future.

“It’s not frivolous. It’s logical,” Bezos said in 2016. “It’s actually a critically important mission for taking this thing to the next level.”

Generating cash

After decades of waning public interest, excitement about space has been reignited over the past few years by the awesome technological innovation , as well as the marketing savvy, of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Branson’s Virgin Galactic and Bezos’s Blue Origin.

As a result, venture capital money is pouring into space startups, with almost $38 billion going to space infrastructure companies in the past decade, according to the latest data from Space Capital, a firm that promotes investment in the industry.

Bezos, who sold $6.6 billion of Amazon stock in May, has said he is spending $1 billion a year on Blue Origin.

But will the new public interest be maintained? The sheer boldness and engineering magic of the 1969 moon landing captured people’s imagination, but then faded as the years passed with little to show for it but dust and rocks.

In line with Blue Origin’s Silicon Valley-style perspective, Lai believes the privatizing of space and the profit motive will make it different this time. Human interest in space exploration is “almost primal,” he said.

He said NASA’s Apollo and Space Shuttle programs faded because they “required so much government support, and the political will to sustain them started to wane. They became very bureaucratic and started to lack vision.”

“What companies like Blue Origin and SpaceX and others are bringing is to make this a commercially sustainable enterprise so it will not require government funding and the biannual cycles of Congress to fund,” Lai said. “If we can make this a commercially sustainable enterprise, it will grow on its own.”

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For that, space tourism will have to be profitable, he asserts.

“We will not get millions of people living and working in space, if it is not profitable.”

‘It will make money’

In Virgin Galactic’s quite different approach to lifting tourists into space, a crewed rocket-powered “spaceplane” is released from underneath a “mothership” at an altitude of 50,000 feet, then fires its engines and launches into space. It’s guided back to land by two pilots.

Branson projects building several global spaceports, enabling 400 flights to space a year on multiple models of the spaceplane.

On the Blue Origin rocket, in contrast, there’s no crew controlling the vehicle at any point, only passengers.

The booster rocket soars upward burning a mix of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. Its exhaust is a trail of water vapor with no carbon emissions.

Near the top of New Shepard’s arc the six-seat passenger capsule detaches. It descends on parachutes while the reusable booster rocket is guided down to land vertically, its descent softened by reigniting the engine as it approaches the ground.

Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket launch starts at 6:30 a.m. Central Daylight Time on Tuesday, July 20, in the West Texas desert. (That’s 4:30 a.m. Pacific Time.) Liftoff is slated for 8 a.m. CDT (6 a.m. PT) but could change.

Three people will join Bezos on Tuesday’s flight, two of them by his personal invitation: his brother, Mark Bezos ; and 82-year-old Wally Funk , one of the original female NASA astronauts trained for the Mercury missions who never got to go to space.

The fourth passenger is 18-year-old Oliver Daemen , son of the CEO of a private equity investment firm whose bid in Blue Origin’s charity auction had initially secured a seat on the second flight. Daemen was moved up after the auction winner, who had bid $28 million, chose to postpone to a later flight.

Rocketing into space is clearly a passionate dream for Bezos.

He often relates being captivated as a 5-year-old watching on TV as Neil Armstrong first stepped onto the moon. Bezos chose Tuesday for the flight because it’s the anniversary of that day 52 years ago.

On that 2016 press tour, he cited two reasons why humans need to go to space. The first, couched as an altruistic ideal, was to create an industrial ecosystem in space to preserve the finite resources here on earth.

The second might have come from his 5-year-old heart: “It’s a glorious adventure,” Bezos said.

Now it must also be a business, said Ariane Cornell, Blue Origin’s astronaut sales director, responsible for selling tickets to individuals who want to ride on New Shepard.

“Our founder has one of the most brilliant business minds around. So, this is a business. I can say that for sure,” Cornell said. “Absolutely. It will make money.”

She said more than 7,600 people registered for the company’s auction to buy a seat on the first flight. Since then, “I have been very busy on the phone talking to very serious customers from around the world.”

“While it’s a nascent market, I can tell you there’s a lot of pent-up demand to go to space,” she added.

After Tuesday’s flight Blue Origin has two more launches with passengers lined up for this year, “and many more to come,” Cornell said.

“People are clearly interested in paying more to be first certainly,” she said. “As more people go, we do see the price coming down.”

And she said the total package offered by Blue Origin is not so ephemeral. Ticket buyers will go to the Texas launch site to train for two days ahead of the rocket launch.

“All of that is part of the experience, not just the 11 minutes off the ground,” Cornell said.

Virgin Galactic, led by CEO Michael Colglazier who was previously president of Disneyland, similarly intends to market an overarching experience around the actual ride.

Cornell pitches the climactic ride to space as life-changing.

“You’re on top of a rocket. You’re going to get the rumble of the engine as you take off, you’re going to feel the G’s come on and you’re going to get that evolution of the colors outside those huge windows,” she said.

When the passengers unbuckle at the top of their capsule’s arc for 3 to 4 minutes of weightless floating and somersaults, they’ll have a striking view of the curvature of the earth, the blackness of space and the colors of the ocean-dominated planet that gave Blue Origin its name.

As for the brevity of that view, Cornell compared it to climbers summiting Everest, then very soon turning around to go back down.

“Still people do it,” she said. “I think people are going to want to do this for years and years and years to come.”

The space tourist market

Doug Harned, a financial analyst with Bernstein Research who covers the space industry, believes the space tourism business can make money near term.

“You can generate a lot of cash with these expensive tickets,” he said. “The operating costs are just dwarfed by what you can bring in revenues.”

Yet he worries the revenue might not be sustained for many years.

He said the two-and-a-half-hour webcast that surrounded Branson’s Virgin Galactic ride last Sunday, hosted by Stephen Colbert, fell flat and prompted scathing Twitter reviews.

“There was so much discussion about what an epic event this is,” said Harned. “Well, you go up there, you’re weightless for three minutes, pretty cool, and then come back down. People look at it and say, ‘Really, is it that exciting?'”

Taber MacCallum, CEO of Space Perspective , has a very different space tourism experience in mind. His Tucson, Ariz.-based company is touting “the world’s most radically gentle voyage to space” in a high-performance space balloon.

It will climb serenely over two hours to an altitude of just 100,000 feet, or 19 miles up, which is less than a third as high as New Shepard. But a successful unmanned test flight from Florida last month showed that’s high enough to view the curvature of the earth and the blackness of space.

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Though it won’t provide the experience of weightlessness, Space Perspective’s enclosed passenger cabin — with a fallback safety parachute in case the balloon fails — will float in the stratosphere for two hours before it starts to descend.

MacCallum is targeting taking passengers up in 2024, though with just one test flight completed he concedes that’s “an aggressive schedule.”

“We will fly when it’s safe,” he said.

Risk and reward

In the meantime, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic are ready to fly space tourists.

And Bezos has bigger plans in the works.

The New Shepard rocket shoots its passengers up high and then goes straight down again, called a suborbital launch.

That’s far short of how the more powerful Falcon 9 rockets built by Elon Musk’s SpaceX boost satellites and humans into a steady orbit around the Earth. SpaceX is expected to take a civilian crew raising money for charity into orbit later this year.

Bezos’ team is working on orbital capability. Blue Origin is developing the much larger, two-stage New Glenn rocket — named after John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth.

Now targeted to fly toward the end of 2022, New Glenn will take payloads and humans into orbit and eventually could go to the moon and beyond.

New Glenn’s first stage will land using the system developed for New Shepard. Its second stage will have engines derived from those of the smaller rocket. Its control software includes many of the same algorithms.

“New Shepard is a critical keystone part of all the programs that we’re doing at Blue,” said Cornell.

Blue Origin’s Latin motto — ‘Gradatim Ferociter’ or “step by step ferociously” — has brought steady success with no serious New Shepard failures. Still, there are dangers with space technology.

Virgin Galactic’s first spaceplane broke up in flight in 2014, when the crew prematurely unlocked the aircraft’s movable tail section. One pilot died and the second was badly injured.

In an April report assessing the financial risk for investors in Virgin Galactic, Harned wrote that a single catastrophic failure with paying passengers aboard, whether by Virgin, Blue Origin or SpaceX, “could have a crushing effect on demand for all.”

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), in granting a launch license to Blue Origin, required it to take out $150 million in liability insurance for its flights. Any personal coverage beyond that is up to the astronauts.

To assess the risk for Bezos on Tuesday, no one is better placed than Gary Lai, who knows every safety system on the New Shepard rocket.

“From the napkin sketch phase through the final design and through most of the certification flights, I led that team,” Lai said.

Through 15 previous New Shepard launches, Lai’s team found problems and fixed them.

Blue Origin designed and flight tested an escape system that propels the passenger capsule to safety away from the main rocket if anything goes wrong on the launchpad or during the ascent.

Conducting hundreds of test flights, as Boeing would do for a new airplane design before putting passengers aboard, would be prohibitively expensive. Yet Lai is confident of success.

At this point, Lai said he has no sense of fear, only excitement.

“I feel we’ve done everything that we can to make this safe,” he said. “The only thing really to make it safer is simply not to fly and just stay on the ground.”

“But that is not what New Shepard was made for, to sit on the ground,” said Lai. “You need to fly.”

The opinions expressed in reader comments are those of the author only and do not reflect the opinions of The Seattle Times.

Space tourism is here – 20 years after the first stellar tourist, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin plans to send civilians to space

Professor of Strategy and Security Studies, Air University

Disclosure statement

Wendy Whitman Cobb is affiliated with the US Air Force School of Advanced Air and Space Studies. Her views are her own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Defense Department or any of its affiliates.

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For most people, getting to the stars is nothing more than a dream. But on May 5, 2021, the 60th anniversary of the first suborbital flight, that dream became a little bit more achievable.

The space company Blue Origin announced that it would start selling tickets for suborbital flights to the edge of space . The first flight is scheduled for July 20, and Jeff Bezos’ company is auctioning off one single ticket to the highest bidder .

But whoever places the winning bid won’t be the first tourist in space.

On April 28, 2001, Dennis Tito, a wealthy businessman, paid US$20 million for a seat on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft to be the first tourist to visit the International Space Station. Only seven civilians have followed suit in the 20 years since, but that number is poised to double in the next 12 months alone.

NASA has long been hesitant to play host to space tourists , so Russia – looking for sources of money post-Cold War in the 1990s and 2000s – has been the only option available to those looking for this kind of extreme adventure. However, it seems the rise of private space companies is going to make it easier for regular people to experience space.

From my perspective as a space policy analyst , recent announcements from companies like Blue Origin and SpaceX are the opening of an era in which more people can experience space. Hoping to build a future for humanity in space, these companies are seeking to use space tourism as a way to demonstrate both the safety and reliability of space travel to the general public.

The development of space tourism

Flights to space like Dennis Tito’s are expensive for a reason. A rocket must burn a lot of costly fuel to travel high and fast enough to enter Earth’s orbit.

Another cheaper possibility is a suborbital launch, with the rocket going high enough to reach the edge of space and coming right back down. This is the kind of flight that Blue Origin is now offering. While passengers on a suborbital trip experience weightlessness and incredible views, these launches are more accessible.

The difficulty and expense of either option has meant that, traditionally, only nation-states have been able to explore space. This began to change in the 1990s as a series of entrepreneurs entered the space arena. Three companies led by billionaire CEOs have emerged as the major players: Blue Origin, SpaceX and Virgin Galactic. Though none have taken paying, private customers to space, all anticipate doing so in the very near future.

British billionaire Richard Branson has built his brand on not just business but also his love of adventure. In pursuing space tourism, Branson has brought both of those to bear. He established Virgin Galactic after buying SpaceShipOne – a company that won the Ansari X-Prize by building the first reusable spaceship. Since then, Virgin Galactic has sought to design, build and fly a larger SpaceShipTwo that can carry up to six passengers in a suborbital flight.

The going has been harder than anticipated. While Branson predicted opening the business to tourists in 2009, Virgin Galactic has encountered some significant hurdles – including the death of a pilot in a crash in 2014 . After the crash, engineers found significant problems with the design of the vehicle, which required modifications.

Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, respective leaders of SpaceX and Blue Origin, began their own ventures in the early 2000s.

Musk, fearing that a catastrophe of some sort could leave Earth uninhabitable, was frustrated at the lack of progress in making humanity a multiplanetary species. He founded SpaceX in 2002 with the goal of first developing reusable launch technology to decrease the cost of getting to space. Since then, SpaceX has found success with its Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft . SpaceX’s ultimate goal is human settlement of Mars; sending paying customers to space is an intermediate step. Musk says he hopes to show that space travel can be done easily and that tourism might provide a revenue stream to support development of the larger, Mars-focused Starship system.

Bezos, inspired by the vision of physicist Gerard O’Neill , wants to expand humanity and industry not to Mars but to space itself. Blue Origin , established in 2004, has proceeded slowly and quietly in also developing reusable rockets. Its New Shepard rocket, first successfully flown in 2015, will be the spaceship taking tourists on suborbital trips to the edge of space this July . For Bezos, these launches represent an effort at making space travel routine, reliable and accessible as a first step to enabling further space exploration.

Outlook for the future

Blue Origin is not the only company offering passengers the opportunity to go into space and orbit the Earth.

SpaceX currently has two tourist launches planned. The first is scheduled for as early as September 2021 , funded by billionaire businessman Jared Isaacman. The other trip, planned for 2022, is being organized by Axiom Space . These trips will be costly for wannabe space travelers, at $55 million for the flight and a stay on the International Space Station. The high cost has led some to warn that space tourism – and private access to space more broadly – might reinforce inequality between rich and poor.

While Blue Origin is already accepting bids for a seat on the first launch, it has not yet announced the cost of a ticket for future trips. Passengers will also need to meet several physical qualifications, including weighing 110 to 223 pounds (50 to 101 kg) and measuring between 5 feet and 6 feet, 4 inches (1.5 to 1.9 meters) in height. Virgin Galactic, which continues to test SpaceShipTwo, has no specific timetable, but its tickets are expected to be priced from $200,000 to $250,000 .

Though these prices are high, it is worth considering that Dennis Tito’s $20 million ticket in 2001 could potentially pay for 100 flights on Blue Origin soon. The experience of viewing the Earth from space, though, may prove to be priceless for a whole new generation of space explorers.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on April 28, 2021. It has been updated to include the announcement by Blue Origin.

• Space tourism
• International Space Station (ISS)
• Virgin Galactic
• Blue Origin
• Suborbital flight

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Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin complete successful spaceflight

• https://www.cbsnews.com/live-updates/jeff-bezos-space-flight-date-time-live-stream/ link copied

By William Harwood

Updated on: July 20, 2021 / 8:46 PM EDT / CBS News

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.

"Best day ever!" an elated Bezos said upon landing.

Competing 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.

Funk, 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. 

The crew lifted off from the company's West Texas launch site at 9:12 a.m. EDT. 

Climbing 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.

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. 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.

Coasting 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.

"I love it!" Funk exclaimed.

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.

"Who wants a Skittle?" Bezos called. "All right, see if you can catch this in your mouth." Daemen did just that, prompting cheers in the cabin. "Toss me one," Bezos said. "Awesome!"

“Who wants a Skittle?”: New footage from inside the capsule shows how Jeff Bezos, Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen spent their time in space https://t.co/5C820HM4EM pic.twitter.com/excCMRm1Zg — CBS News (@CBSNews) July 20, 2021

"That is just incredible," Daemen said a moment later.

"I love it, I love it," Funk said again. She could be seen floating in front of a window, staring out at Earth and space, a view she had dreamed about for decades.

The capsule, named "First Step," reached a maximum altitude of 66.5 miles, more than four miles above the internationally recognized 62-mile-high "boundary" between the aerodynamically discernible atmosphere and space.

That's the altitude recognized by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, a Switzerland-based organization that sanctions aerospace records.

Branson's Virgin Galactic spaceplane flies about 10 miles lower but well above the 50-mile altitude recognized by NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration as the point where wings, rudders and other aerosurfaces no longer have any effect.

Two minutes after booster engine shutdown and the onset of weightlessness, the crew was warned they had about a minute to make their way back to their seats to strap in for re-entry. All too soon, weight returned as both began falling back into the lower atmosphere.

The crew had no problems strapping back in. And even on the way down, the view was spectacular. "It's dark up here!" Funk exclaimed. One of her crewmates could be heard saying "well, that was intense" while another said he was "happy, happy, happy!"

The reusable New Shepard booster, meanwhile, headed back to Earth on its own, plunging tail first toward a landing pad two miles from the launch site.

The rocket relied on deployable air brakes and steering fins to maintain its orientation before re-igniting its BE-3 engine, unfolding four hinged legs and settling to a picture-perfect landing.

"Your booster has landed," Blue Origin capsule communicator, or CAPCOM, Sarah Knights radioed the crew.

"It's great to hear about the booster," Bezos replied replied. "You have a very happy crew up here, I want you to know."

At an altitude of about 2,700 feet, three large parachutes unfurled and inflated, slowing the New Shepard's descent to about 16 mph.

Then, just six feet or so off the ground, nitrogen powered thrusters fired, slowing the capsule to just 1 mph and kicking up a roiling cloud of dust as the spacecraft gently touched down.

"Welcome back to Earth, First Step, congratulations to all of you," Knights radioed.

"Very happy group of people in this capsule," Bezos replied. "We're so grateful to everybody who made this possible. Thank you."

Blue Origin recovery crews converged on the capsule within minutes of touchdown to open the hatch and help the returning astronauts exit. All four emerged in obvious high spirits, smiling and hugging family members and support personnel.

"Oh my God!" Bezos told reporters later. "My expectations were high, and they were drastically exceeded. The zero G (gravity) piece may have been one of the biggest surprises because it felt so normal, it felt almost like humans evolved to be in that environment. ... It's a very pleasurable experience."

The most profound aspect, he said, was the view of Earth from an altitude that showcased the fragility of the planet and its thin atmosphere.

"Every astronaut, everybody who's been up into space, they say this, that it changes them, and they look at it and they're kind of amazed and awestruck by the Earth and it beauty, but also by its fragility," he said. "And I can vouch for that.

"It's one thing to recognize that intellectually, it's another thing to actually see with your own eyes how fragile it really is. And that was amazing."

Funk, who once underwent grueling medical tests only to be barred from NASA's early astronaut corps, said she enjoyed "every minute of it."

"I want to thank you, sweetheart, because you made it possible for me," she told Bezos. "I've been waiting a long time to finally get it up there. ... I loved it. I loved being here with all of you, your families. We had a great time. It was wonderful. I want to go again, fast!"

"I have been waiting a long time to finally get up there" Wally Funk, who was barred from NASA's initially all-male astronaut corps in the 1960s, finally got her chance to go to space, realizing a lifelong dream. pic.twitter.com/Hvt9VihQV8 — CBS News (@CBSNews) July 20, 2021

Former astronaut Jeff Ashby, now chief of mission assurance at Blue Origin, pinned astronaut wings on all four crew members. 

As for Tuesday's flight, it was the 16th successful launch of a New Shepard spacecraft, the third for the booster and First Step capsule, and Blue Origin's first with passengers on board.

Blue Origin plans to launch three more New Shepard flights before the end of the year, one with science payloads on board and two with passengers.

"We're going to fly human missions twice more this year," Bezos said. "What we do in the following year, I'm not sure yet. We'll figure that out and what the cadence will eventually be. We want the cadence to be very high."

He added, "We're approaching $100 million in private sales already and the demand is very, very high. So we're going to keep after that."

Ticket prices have not been revealed. The cost of a flight aboard Virgin Galactic's spaceplane is believed to be around $250,000 and Blue Origin tickets are expected to be competitive. But both companies hope economies of scale will eventually lower prices to less astronomical levels.

"We're not done once we fly this vehicle, it's really just the beginning," Lai said. "We are going to ramp up operations. We're going to have dozens and eventually hundreds and thousands of astronauts we hope fly on New Shepard. So it is just the beginning. But it is a monumental moment nevertheless."

CBS News' Mark Strassmann reports on the historic journey in the video below:

Jeff Bezos shares emotional moment in exclusive interview

Jeff and Mark Bezos sat down for an exclusive interview with "CBS This Morning" co-host Gayle King after they landed back on Earth.

"Clearly it's a bonding moment for the two of you. Did you have a moment with the two of you up there?" King asked.

"We had a couple of those moments," Jeff Bezos replied. "We had about, I don't know, 25 minutes on the ground, with the crew capsules sealed. So it's just the four of us in there, and my brother and I, we picked seats so that we could see each other from our seats … We had some really good, quality time there." 

Before liftoff, mission control read them a message from their sister, Christina: "Now hurry up and your a-- back down here so I can give you a huge hug. We love you and Godspeed," her message said. 

"I actually teared up right there in the capsule," Jeff Bezos said. "It was so heartfelt and, you know, she talked about some of the things we did as kids. It was a very sweet message." 

Watch more of Gayle King's interview with Jeff and Mark Bezos on " CBS This Morning " on Wednesday.

• https://www.cbsnews.com/live-updates/jeff-bezos-space-flight-date-time-live-stream/#post-update-694c36a7 link copied

Bezos announces major philanthropic donation

Bezos capped off his post-landing press conference by announcing a new philanthropic initiative, the Courage and Civility Award. Recipients will be given $100 million to distribute to the charities and nonprofits of their choice.

"It recognizes leaders who aim high and who pursue solutions with courage and who always do so with civility," Bezos said. "It's easy to be courageous but also mean. Try being courageous and civil. Try being courageous and a unifier. That's harder, and way better, and makes the world better."

He announced two recipients Tuesday: Van Jones, a lawyer, TV commentator and co-founder of Dream Corps, which is focused on criminal justice reform; and chef José Andrés , founder of World Central Kitchen, which provides meals in the wake of natural disasters.

Both men will receive $100 million, Bezos said, with "no bureaucracy, no committees, they just do what they want. They can give it all to their own charity or they can share the wealth. It's up to them."

• https://www.cbsnews.com/live-updates/jeff-bezos-space-flight-date-time-live-stream/#post-update-a3b43ab5 link copied

Jeff Bezos on the most profound moment of spaceflight

Shortly after landing, Jeff Bezos told CBS News' Mark Strassmann that he felt at peace up at the edge of space. 

"The most interesting thing about that is it felt so normal and natural. Almost like we were, humans were evolved to be in zero G. Which of course is impossible, but it felt that way. It felt peaceful, serene and calm, surprisingly natural," Bezos said. 

The most profound moment, he said, was when he looked out at the Earth's atmosphere and realized how "teensy" it was.

"You hear about that, but to see it is a different thing. We think the atmosphere is gigantic because it is all around us, but in reality, when you get up there, you can see it is life-sustaining and teensy."

Bezos said spaceflight was a humbling experience.

"You look at this thing, and you see how small you are, and you see that the world is big, you see that the atmosphere is small. You see that there are no boundaries or no lines, no national states," Bezos said.  "This world is full of not enough unifiers and too many vilifiers. When you get up there, you see that we are one world, this is one planet, and we should have a lot of unifiers."

While Bezos' space dream became a reality when he blasted off aboard his New Shepard rocket, he says this is just the beginning. Asked if today's flight will motivate him to push deeper into the cosmos, Bezos replied, "Hell yes!"

"Hell yes!": Jeff Bezos tells CBS News' Mark Strassmann that this morning's successful Blue Origin flight will motivate him to push deeper into space. https://t.co/NTBGPuuMhx pic.twitter.com/FFBB2wjack — CBS News (@CBSNews) July 20, 2021

"We are already building our orbital vehicle. We have to build a road to space. This … tourism mission is about practicing. You can fly this over and over again and get really good at it. Because we have to have space vehicles that are operable as commercial airliners," he said. "Then the next generation of kids can build truly great things in space and move all heavy industry and polluting industry off Earth and protect this gem of a planet." 

• https://www.cbsnews.com/live-updates/jeff-bezos-space-flight-date-time-live-stream/#post-update-cba527d3 link copied

"How it felt? Oh my God!"

The crew held a press conference at the Blue Origin launch facility to talk about their flight about two and a half hours after landing.

Jeff Bezos thanked the team and added, "I want to thank every Amazon employee, and every Amazon customer because you guys paid for all this."

He said the spaceflight experience was even better than he hoped.

"How it felt? Oh my God! My expectations were high but they were drastically exceeded," he said.

Jeff Bezos says he will definitely be flying into space again "soon" https://t.co/5C820HM4EM pic.twitter.com/D921o1QxgC — CBS News (@CBSNews) July 20, 2021

"I felt great," said crewmate Wally Funk, who first sought to join NASA's astronaut corps in the 1960s.

"I want to thank you, sweetheart, because you made it possible for me," she said to Bezos. "I have been waiting a long time to finally get up there."

“We can confirm that Wally, once again in training, outperformed the men, 100%,” Jeff Bezos says of aviation icon Wally Funk https://t.co/5C820HM4EM pic.twitter.com/T6mNgKFqeV — CBS News (@CBSNews) July 20, 2021

• https://www.cbsnews.com/live-updates/jeff-bezos-space-flight-date-time-live-stream/#post-update-7a98dd03 link copied

Who is Wally Funk?

Wally Funk , a trailblazing aviator, became the oldest person ever to travel to space with  Tuesday's flight.

The 82-year-old had her first flight lesson at age 9, became a licensed pilot at 17 and has logged more than 19,000 flying hours. But her lifelong dream of going to space eluded her — until now.

In the 1960s, while America's first astronauts were going through NASA's rigorous training, Funk was part of the Mercury 13, a group of 13 women who went through the same grueling exams. She recently described to CBS News' Michelle Miller some of the painful and strenuous tests the group of women endured.

"X-raying all over your body, every bone, every tooth, sticking water into your ears. I had to drink radioactive water," she said.

The women of Mercury 13 met — and often surpassed — the results of the men. But the women would never get their chance. NASA required astronauts to be military test pilots, and the military at the time didn't allow women to fly.

On Tuesday, though, her dream was realized.

"I'm going. That is my quest," she said ahead of the spaceflight. "I love flying, that's my job, that's what I love. And I'm not a quitter." 

At a press conference after landing, she grinned from ear to ear as she received her astronaut wings for the achievement.

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Celebrating with a champagne shower

Jeff Bezos and his crewmates were greeted by cheering family members and friends upon their return. Bezos and others popped bottles of champagne in celebration, showering the crew with it.

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Picture-perfect landing

Eight minutes after liftoff, the three parachutes deployed on the crew capsule to slow it down for landing as it descended back to Earth.

The capsule landed with a gentle touchdown at 9:22 a.m. EDT.

• https://www.cbsnews.com/live-updates/jeff-bezos-space-flight-date-time-live-stream/#post-update-b55a97ca link copied

Jeff Bezos and three crewmates blasted off at 9:12 a.m. EDT on Blue Origin's first passenger space flight. The thrilling 10-minute up-and-down flight to an altitude of over 62 miles above the Earth is intended to set the stage for the start of commercial passenger service later this year.

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"Brief hold" is lifted, with crew in the capsule ready to go

The four crew members are strapped into their seats and ready for launch, but with about 15 minutes left in the countdown Blue Origin said there would be a "brief hold." It did not explain the reason for the delay. Most of the company's recent test flights have also had at least brief delays before launching.

The hold was lifted a few minutes later and the countdown resumed.

• https://www.cbsnews.com/live-updates/jeff-bezos-space-flight-date-time-live-stream/#post-update-67fe2370 link copied

Astronauts head to the launch pad

The crew emerged from Blue Origin's astronaut training center and climbed into an SUV for the ride to the launch pad about 45 minutes ahead of the scheduled launch time. A few minutes later they arrived and climbed the stairs to board the crew capsule.

• https://www.cbsnews.com/live-updates/jeff-bezos-space-flight-date-time-live-stream/#post-update-853567e8 link copied

Final preparations underway

"CBS This Morning" co-host Gayle King reports from the launch site near Van Horn, Texas, that weather conditions look good for launch Tuesday morning. Blue Origin says the crew is ready to go.

"Our astronauts have completed training and are a go for launch," the company tweeted .

"#NewShepard is on the pad. The launch team completed vehicle rollout this morning and final preparations are underway." 

#NewShepard is on the pad. The launch team completed vehicle rollout this morning and final preparations are underway. Liftoff is targeted for 8:00 am CDT / 13:00 UTC. Live broadcast begins at T-90 minutes on https://t.co/7Y4TherpLr . #NSFirstHumanFlight pic.twitter.com/oShmtRmA4n — Blue Origin (@blueorigin) July 20, 2021

The launch is scheduled for a significant date in space history — the 52nd anniversary of the  Apollo 11 moon landing .

• https://www.cbsnews.com/live-updates/jeff-bezos-space-flight-date-time-live-stream/#post-update-a7742ad1 link copied

New Shepard rocket designed to be "the safest human spaceflight vehicle"

When he launches into space, Jeff Bezos will be giving his company's product the ultimate endorsement: riding on a fully automated rocket that has never before carried a human to the edge of space.

"We set out to create the safest human spaceflight vehicle ever designed or built or operated," said Gary Lai, director of design for the New Shepard.

The system's safety features include three braking parachutes and thrusters to slow the capsule right before landing so it touches down at just 1 mile per hour.

"The capsule is designed to be survivable if only one of the main parachutes opens," Lai told CBS News correspondent Mark Strassmann. The system "will do its utmost to slow the vehicle down, but then there is a crushable structure at the bottom of the capsule that will absorb some of the impact, and then the seat has an energy absorption mechanism, a scissor mechanism, that then takes the astronaut and decelerates them at a safe velocity."

Another safety feature is the integrated, autonomous escape system. 

Ariane Cornell, director of astronaut and orbital sales at Blue Origin, explained, "If there's any issue detected with the rocket ... we will fire this escape motor to get the capsule far and fast away from the booster."

And they've made sure it works at every stage of the mission: on the launch pad, in flight and all the way in space. In all 15 test flights, the capsule returned safely to the ground.

"There's a lot of people, hundreds of engineers over the years that have worked on this vehicle. So this is a culmination of a dream for them," Lai said.

• https://www.cbsnews.com/live-updates/jeff-bezos-space-flight-date-time-live-stream/#post-update-23c39416 link copied

Meet the Blue Origin crew

Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and one of the wealthiest men in the world with a net worth of more than $200 billion, started Blue Origin in 2000 to turn his dream of commercial spaceflight into reality. Two decades later, he announced plans to board its first passenger flight along with his younger brother, Mark.

"Ever since I was five years old, I've dreamed of traveling to space," Bezos wrote on  Instagram . "On July 20th, I will take that journey with my brother. The greatest adventure, with my best friend."

He later introduced two more crewmates:  Wally Funk , a legendary pilot who was one of the 13 female fliers tested but ultimately barred from NASA's initially all-male astronaut corps in the 1960s, and teenage space enthusiast Oliver Daemen, whose family paid an undisclosed sum for his seat.

All four talked about their excitement in an interview on "CBS This Morning" the day before launch.

The flight was originally supposed to include the winner of an online auction who bid $28 million for the privilege, but that anonymous bidder had a schedule conflict and opted to join a later flight instead.

The crew was slated to undergo 14 hours of training over two days to familiarize them with the spacecraft, but they won't actually be flying it themselves — the New Shepard is fully automated , with no pilots or flight controls onboard.

• https://www.cbsnews.com/live-updates/jeff-bezos-space-flight-date-time-live-stream/#post-update-1213941d link copied

Billionaire owners deny it's a "space race" as they vie for wealthy passengers

After Bezos announced his launch plans, Richard Branson, owner of the rival space company Virgin Galactic, upstaged him by lifting off on his own sub-orbital flight on July 11. But they both insist they don't view the competition as a "space race."

"I've said this so many times, it really wasn't a race," Branson said after landing. "We're just delighted that everything went so fantastically well. We wish Jeff the absolute best and the people who are going up with him during his flight."

Blue Origin, in its  mission statement , says "we are not in a race" and vows to pursue its goal of "building a road to space" according to its Latin motto,  Gradatim Ferociter : "Step by step, ferociously."

Yet both are looking for an edge in the emerging business of launching paying customers on short trips to space. 

Virgin Galactic plans to start regular commercial operations in early 2022, and is aiming to carry out 400 flights per year from Spaceport America, its base in New Mexico. Some 600 tickets have already been sold, including to Hollywood celebrities, for prices ranging between $200,000 and $250,000. Tickets are expected to be even more expensive when they go on sale to the public.

Blue Origin has yet to announce ticket prices or a date for the start of commercial operations. 

However, while the companies are enthusiastic, the idea of billionaire owners and wealthy passengers spending huge sums on space tourism has sparked some backlash. 

"Jeff Bezos' 11-minute thrill ride to space is an insult to the millions of people here on planet Earth who struggle every day to feed their families and make ends meet," Oxfam America said in a statement. "Many of them are the very Amazon workers who helped make Bezos the richest man in the world."

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Blue Origin vs Virgin Galactic: How their spacecraft compare

Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin chose different routes to space.

Virgin Galactic's VSS Unity spaceplane, which carries two pilots and up to six passengers, is launched from a carrier jet that flies it up an altitude of about 45,000 feet. From there, it is released and fires its rocket engine to propel it to an altitude of a little over 50 miles above the Earth. 

The crew gets to experience about three minutes of weightlessness before the spaceplane begins a spiraling descent and glides to a runway landing.  Branson's flight  lasted 59 minutes from takeoff to touchdown.

Blue Origin's crew capsule launches vertically atop a reusable single-stage rocket and then soars out of the lower atmosphere on its own to an altitude higher than 62 miles before arcing over and beginning a parachute descent back to Earth. The entire flight lasts about 10 minutes.

Though Blue Origin's flight is shorter, both companies offer passengers about the same amount of time in weightlessness.

NASA, the Federal Aviation Administration and the U.S. Space Force agree that space effectively begins at an altitude of 50 miles, so Branson's flight earned him his "astronaut wings."

The Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI), an international body based in Switzerland that certifies aerospace records, considers an altitude of 100 kilometers, or 62 miles — a level known as the Kármán Line — as the dividing line between the discernible atmosphere and space. 

Blue Origin's spacecraft is designed to reach that higher altitude, and the company boasted in a tweet : "None of our astronauts have an asterisk next to their name." 

Virgin Galactic says the altitude difference is trivial and that no such "asterisk" is warranted given that NASA and other U.S. authorities all consider altitudes higher than 50 miles to be in space.

• https://www.cbsnews.com/live-updates/jeff-bezos-space-flight-date-time-live-stream/#post-update-d5091b3f link copied

How to watch the Blue Origin space launch

• What:  Jeff Bezos and three crewmates launch aboard Blue Origin's New Shepard spacecraft
• Date:  Tuesday, July 20, 2021
• Time:  Liftoff currently targeted for 9 a.m. EDT
• Location:  Blue Origin's Launch Site One, in the desert near Van Horn, Texas
• On TV:  "CBS This Morning" co-host Gayle King and "CBS Evening News" anchor Norah O'Donnell lead CBS News' Special Report on the launch — coverage begins at 8:59 a.m. EDT on  your local CBS station
• Online stream:  Watch live on  CBSN  in the video player above or on your  mobile or streaming device  — coverage begins at 8:15 a.m. EDT
• https://www.cbsnews.com/live-updates/jeff-bezos-space-flight-date-time-live-stream/#post-update-ec0a5204 link copied
• Blue Origin

Bill Harwood has been covering the U.S. space program full-time since 1984, first as Cape Canaveral bureau chief for United Press International and now as a consultant for CBS News.

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Bezos Is Back On Earth — But The Space Tourism Industry Is Just Launching Off

Geoff Brumfiel

The spaceflight company Blue Origin, founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos, has successfully completed its first flight into space with passengers aboard, including the Amazon founder himself.

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Every Person Launched Into Space by Blue Origin, So Far

Jeff bezos's rocket company has launched 31 people to space to date..

Blue Origin is finally ready to resume its space tourism program after a nine-month pause. The rocket company owned by Jeff Bezos was grounded by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) after a cargo-only mission failed in September 2022. New Shepard, the rocket used for the mission, is also the vehicle used to fly paying customers to suborbital space.

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At an industry event on June 6, Blue Origin CEO Bob Smith said the company could resume New Shepard crew launches “ within the next few weeks ,” pending approval from the FAA.

The rocket company returned to the spotlight this week also because one of its former customers, billionaire adventurer Hamish Harding , went missing on an OceanGate submersible in the North Atlantic on June 18 during an undersea trip to see the shipwreck of the Titanic.

Harding flew to suborbital space on a New Shepard flight in June 2022. Blue Origin has to date launched 30 other people into space, including its founder Bezos, a few company employees, and many celebrities and business figures. One person enjoyed the experience so much that he flew twice within one year.

Every Blue Origin passenger, in the order of launch date:

• Jeff Bezos (July 20, 2021): cofounder of Amazon and Blue Origin.
• Mark Bezos (July 20, 2021): Jeff Bezos’s younger half-brother. Mark Bezos ran his own advertising agency in the early 2000s before becoming an executive at nonprofits backed by Jeff Bezos, including the Bezos Family Foundation. He is also an early investor in Amazon.
• Wally Funk (July 20, 2021): American aviation pioneer. Funk became the oldest person to go to space when she flew with Blue Origin at age 82, breaking a record held by NASA astronaut John Glenn for 23 years.
• Oliver Daemen (July 20, 2021): Dutch physics student and the son of Joes Daemen, the CEO of Somerset Capital Partners, a hedge fund managing $8 billion in assets. Joes Daemen bought a seat on Blue Origin through an online auction but couldn’t make the trip due to a scheduling conflict. He reportedly paid $28 million for the flight.
• Chris Boshuizen (October 13, 2021) : Cofounder of Planet Labs , an Earth-imaging satellite company based in San Francisco.
• Glen de Vries (October 13, 2021): Cofounder and co-CEO of Medidata Solutions, a software company providing solutions for clinical trials.
• William Shatner (October 13, 2021): Actor best known for his portrayal of Captain James T. Kirk of the USS Enterprise in the Star Trek television series and movies. Shatner broke Funk’s record as the oldest person in space when he flew with Blue Origin at age 90.
• Audrey Powers (October 13, 2021): Blue Origin’s vice president of mission and flight operations.
• Lane Bess (December 11, 2021): Tech investor and founder of Bess Ventures and Advisory. Before becoming an investor, Bess held executive roles at AT&T, Trend Micro and Palo Alto Networks.
• Cameron Bess (December 11, 2021): Content creator and the son of Lane Bess.
• Evan Dick (December 11, 2021 and June 4, 2022): Retired engineer and tech investor. He is a managing member of Dick Holdings, an investment firm. He he has flown with Blue Origin twice—in December 2021 and June 2022.
• Laura Shepard Churchley (December 11, 2021): Daughter of astronaut Alan Shepard (after whom the New Shepard rocket is named). She serves as the chair of the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation, a nonprofit providing mentoring for college students and STEM scholars.
• Michael Strahan (December 11, 2021): Good Morning America co-anchor and former NFL player.
• Dylan Taylor (December 11, 2021): Investor and CEO of Voyager Space Holdings, a space exploration company. He is also the founder of Space for Humanity, a space nonprofit.
• Marty Allen (March 31, 2022): Startup investor and turnaround executive. Allen is known for successfully restructuring struggling retailers, including Party America and California Closet Company.
• Marc Hagle (March 31, 2022): CEO of Tricor International, a residential and commercial property development firm based in Florida.
• Sharon Hagle (March 31, 2022): Wife of Marc Hagle and founder of SpaceKids Global, an education nonprofit focusing on encouraging elementary students to pursue careers in STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and math) fields.
• Jim Kitchen (March 31, 2022): Business professor at the University of North Carolina and entrepreneur. Kitchen is a Gold Member of the Travelers’ Century Club, a club for people who have visited 100 or more countries. He has travelled to all 193 United Nations recognized countries.
• George Nield (March 31, 2022): Former FAA administrator and president of Commercial Space Technologies, a firm specializing in space industry consulting and mission brokerage.
• Gary Lai (March 31, 2022): Chief architect of Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket.
• Katya Echazarreta (June 4, 2022): Mexican electrical engineer and host of a popular science show on YouTube. Echazarreta is one of the seven women featured in toy maker Mattel’s newest Barbie doll lineup released in March.
• Hamish Harding (June 4, 2022): Chairman of Action Aviation, Dubai-based aircraft operations company, and founder of Action Group, a private equity investment company. He holds three adventure-related Guinness World Records . (Harding was declared dead on June 23, along with four other passengers on the OceanGate submersible, at the age of 58.)
• Victor Correa Hespanha (June 4, 2022): Brazilian civil production engineer. Hespanha won his Blue Origin ticket from a lottery sponsored by the Crypto Space Agency, an organization funded entirely by the NFT community through mint proceeds.
• Jaison Robinson (June 4, 2022): Founder of JJM Investments, a U.K. commercial and residential real estate company, and cofounder of Dream Variations Ventures, a private investment firm.
• Victor Vescovo (June 4, 2022): Cofounder of Insight Equity, a private equity investment firm based in New York.
• Coby Cotton (August 4, 2022): Cofounder of popular sports entertainment YouTube channel “Dude Perfect.” His Blue Origin ticket was sponsored by crypto collective MoonDAO.
• Mário Ferreira (August 4, 2022): Portuguese entrepreneur with business ventures in tourism, hotel, real estate and photography sectors, among others. He is the first person from Portugal to go in space.
• Vanessa O'Brien (August 4, 2022): British-American mountaineer. She holds the Guinness World Record as the first woman to reach extremes on land (Mt. Everest), sea (Challenger Deep) and air (pass the Kármán line with the Blue Origin flight).
• Clint Kelly III (August 4, 2022): Retired engineer at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). His Autonomous Land Vehicle project, founded in the 1980s, contributed to the development of self-driving technology.
• Sara Sabry (August 4, 2022): Engineer and founder of Deep Space Initiative, a nonprofit focusing on research in space. She is the first person from Egypt to fly to space.
• Steve Young (August 4, 2022): Restauranteur and former CEO of his family business, Young’s Communications, a telecommunications installation company. He is the owner of Pineapples, a restaurant in Melbourne, Florida.

• SEE ALSO : What Melinda French Gates’s Philanthropy Could Look Like Post-Gates Foundation

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Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin could soon launch Nigeria's 1st-ever space tourist

Public voting will decide who gets to fly to space on Blue Origin's New Shepard suborbital vehicle.

A Nigerian could soon make it to space for the first time ever, via Jeff Bezos' aerospace company Blue Origin.

The Space Exploration and Research Agency (SERA), a U.S. for-profit company, has guaranteed that one of the six seats for an upcoming flight of Blue Origin's New Shepard suborbital vehicle will go to a Nigerian, Semafor reports .

SERA chose Nigeria as part of its initiative to assist citizens of nations who have historically lacked access to space. The development follows Blue Origin and SERA partnering up in April to fly people on New Shephard tourist flights .

Excited to team with SERA, the Space Exploration & Research Agency, to support such an inspiring initiative that makes space more accessible to so many countries! We’re looking forward to flying these future astronauts on #NewShepard and hearing their perspectives about the… https://t.co/R3XEtVkRow April 22, 2024

The Nigerian government signed a memorandum of understanding with SERA, according to the state-backed Voice of Nigeria.

Mathew Adepoju, director-general of the National Space Research and Development Agency (NASRDA), praised the development.

"Not many nations in Africa dreamt of having a space program, but today, NASRDA is the only space agency in Africa whose activities cover the entire space," Adepoju said, according to Voice of Nigeria.

Selection will be open and democratic, with Nigerians given the opportunity to select candidates.

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"The process of the application will be open to anybody in Nigeria who is over 18 years of age. There are no other qualifications required. You will be able to sign up and encourage others to vote for you," Voice of Nigeria quoted SERA co-founder Joshua Skurla as saying.

Nigeria has a modest space sector but has a number of satellites in orbit, built and launched by other nations. NASRDA has stated that the nation's objectives include developing indigenous capabilities in satellite technology and utilizing space technology for sustainable development, as well as getting involved in human spaceflight.

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: [email protected].

Andrew is a freelance space journalist with a focus on reporting on China's rapidly growing space sector. He began writing for Space.com in 2019 and writes for SpaceNews, IEEE Spectrum, National Geographic, Sky & Telescope, New Scientist and others. Andrew first caught the space bug when, as a youngster, he saw Voyager images of other worlds in our solar system for the first time. Away from space, Andrew enjoys trail running in the forests of Finland. You can follow him on Twitter  @AJ_FI .

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Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk space feud reignites with Blue Origin request

The  billionaire space race  between Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Elon Musk’s SpaceX has taken a dramatic turn.

Last week, Blue Origin filed a  public comment  to the FAA requesting that the regulator limit the number of launches of SpaceX’s Starship—the largest and most powerful rocket ever built—out of Launch Complex-39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, which currently hosts the company’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets.

The FAA in May released a  SpaceX proposal  for high-frequency Starship operations at Kennedy, including the construction of infrastructure that would allow Musk’s firm to complete 44 launches per year.

The filing is the latest wrinkle in the  multiyear feud  between Musk and Bezos, who have exchanged taunts and  legal actions  as they battle for supremacy in the commercial spaceflight industry. Both SpaceX and Blue Origin have obtained contracts from U.S. government agencies such as NASA and the Pentagon and intend to make  cosmic tourism  a piece of their business.

“Sue Origin,” Musk  bantered  on social media platform X, which he acquired in 2022.

In a  subsequent post , the SpaceX boss added, “An obviously disingenuous response. Not cool of them to try (for the third time) to impede SpaceX’s progress by lawfare.”

The public comment filed by Blue Origin has no legal bearing, but the FAA  will consider it  as it determines what restrictions to place on Starship at Kennedy.

SpaceX is seeking a commercial launch vehicle operator license for Starship operations at Launch Complex 39-A, which will require the preparation of an environmental impact statement (EIS). The EIS describes the potential effects of those operations on the surrounding environment and was required for SpaceX to begin the Starship  orbital test flight program , for example. SpaceX will prepare the assessment itself under FAA supervision.

During Starship’s maiden voyage, which ended in a ball of flames a few minutes into the mission, the impact from the launch caused unexpected damage as far as 6 miles away from the Starbase launchpad in Boca Chica, Texas. The force of Starship broke windows, sent ashy debris into the sky, and brought an FAA investigation into SpaceX’s environmental mitigations, grounding the rocket for months. Five environmental groups  sued the FAA  over its handling of the mission.

Since then, SpaceX has  made several improvements  to Starbase to contain Starship’s debris field, and subsequent missions have resulted in little fanfare. However, it appears Blue Origin will use the incident as leverage in its plea to the FAA.

“At Starbase, Starship and Super Heavy test missions have been subject to environmental scrutiny due to their impact on the local environment and community,” the public comment reads, citing the aforementioned lawsuit against the regulator as evidence.

Blue Origin too launches operations out of Kennedy. The company leases Space Launch Complex-36 and occupies several hangars, as well as a manufacturing site, at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station (CCSFS), which it says are close to the area SpaceX wants to use.

“Blue Origin employs over 2,700 full-time employees in [Florida’s] Brevard County, including 449 employees at CCSFS that are directly impacted by local launch activities,” the filing reads. “Blue Origin has invested more than $1 billion in capital expenditures to develop [Launch Complex-36] as the first privately built heavy-lift launch complex in the world.”

The company said it worries about the safety of property and personnel during a Starship launch anomaly, such as an explosion, fire, debris, or loud noise. It also argued that Starship operations could impede Blue Origin’s access to shared infrastructure and “limited airspace and maritime resources.”

Starship and the Super Heavy booster hold about 5,200 metric tons of liquid methane for propulsion—the force of which, Blue Origin claims, would impede company and government activities at Kennedy due to the anticipated requirement of a safety margin around the site.

The firm urged the FAA to place a cap on the number of Starship launches, specify and limit launch times, and invest in infrastructure that would make Kennedy and CCSFS safer and more accessible for other launch providers.

It also suggested that SpaceX and the government be required to compensate Blue Origin or other companies whose commercial activities are impacted by Starship, as well as mandatory penalties for SpaceX should it violate the EIS or its license.

Given Bezos’ history with Musk, it’s difficult to say whether genuine concern, a desire to hamper the competition, or both prompted the comment.

Blue Origin is developing an alternative to Starship, New Glenn, but the rocket has  faced delays  and has yet to fly. New Glenn has collected a handful of customers, including Amazon’s Project Kuiper and NASA, which intends to launch it to Mars on its maiden voyage later this year.

NASA was at the center of the most publicized dispute between Blue Origin and SpaceX. After the space agency tapped SpaceX as the sole provider of a human landing system (HLS) for Artemis missions to the moon, Bezos in 2021 took NASA to court, arguing that it had promised two contracts

The company would  ultimately lose  that battle. But the space agency in 2023  announced  Blue Origin as the second Artemis HLS provider. Both companies are now working with NASA to develop  a revamped plan  for the Mars Sample Return Program, each receiving a $1.5 million contract.

The firms are also competing in the military sphere. In 2022, Blue Origin lost out on a  pair of Pentagon contracts  at the expense of SpaceX and United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin. But earlier this month, it secured  its own agreement  with the U.S. Space Force for 30 military launches, worth up to $5.6 billion.

This article was first published on FLYINGMAG.com

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Elon Musk is reigniting his space feud with Jeff Bezos: 'Sue Origin'

• Space barons Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have long had competing ambitions to take over the skies.
• Bezos' Blue Origin recently proposed a cap on SpaceX's launches due to environmental concerns.
• Musk slammed the move and gave the company a new moniker: "Sue Origin."

Jeff Bezos' rocket company, Blue Origin, thinks the FAA should cap SpaceX's launches — and Elon Musk isn't too pleased about it.

Blue Origin recently expressed concerns over the environmental impacts of SpaceX's rocket launches on nearby facilities in a filing to the FAA, which the agency published on Friday.

The company also recommended imposing a cap on the Starship-Super Heavy mega-rocket's "launch, landing, and other operations" so that it would have a "minimal impact on the local environment, locally operating personnel, and the local community."

"An obviously disingenuous response," Musk said on X on Tuesday. "Not cool of them to try (for the third time) to impede SpaceX's progress by lawfare."

"Sue Origin," Musk said in a subsequent post, taking a jab at the company's name.

This isn't the first time the two space barons have feuded .

Related stories

In fact, Musk himself mentioned two other disputes that SpaceX had with Blue Origin in the past in an earlier post he made on Tuesday.

In 2013, Blue Origin filed a complaint with the Government Accountability Office (GAO) after NASA chose to lease one of its launchpads at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to SpaceX. The GAO rejected their complaint.

Then, in 2014, Blue Origin was granted a patent for a reusable rocket concept that involved landing the rocket on a boat. The US Patent and Trademark Office canceled the patent a year later after SpaceX protested that the technology being patented " was, at best, 'old hat' by 2009. "

In past years, Blue Origin also sued to stop SpaceX from using what is now our primary launchpad at 39A and tried to patent landing a rocket on a ship, even though that idea had been around for 70 years! — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 25, 2024

To be sure, Blue Origin isn't the only party that has flagged the environmental concerns posed by SpaceX's rocket launches.

In 2021, residents of Brownsville, Texas, told BI that rocket explosions at a nearby SpaceX launchpad were a source of environmental pollution.

"SpaceX explosions are littering our ecosystems, home to the endangered ocelot, aplomado falcon, and numerous migratory birds," Brownsville resident Bekah Hinojosa told BI's Kate Duffy .

SpaceX and Blue Origin did not immediately respond to requests for comment from BI sent outside regular business hours.

Watch: A report says Starlink terminals are being used in Russia after Putin and Musk deny it

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International Edition

Elektrostal, Moscow Oblast, Russia

Elektrostal is a city in the Moscow Oblast of Russia, located around 30 km east of Moscow. It is home to around 160,000 inhabitants and is an important industrial and cultural center in the region. The city is known for its vibrant night lights, which are a major attraction for both tourists and locals alike.

The amount of light pollution in Elektrostal is quite significant, due to the large number of industrial facilities and residential buildings. The city's industrial sector, which includes metallurgical plants, chemical factories, and power stations, is one of the main sources of light pollution in the area. The city's residential areas also contribute to the problem, as many people leave their lights on throughout the night.

One of the most well-known landmarks in Elektrostal is the Monument to the Conquerors of Space, which was built in 1964 to commemorate the achievements of the Soviet space program. The monument is illuminated at night and is visible from many parts of the city. Another notable landmark is the Elektrostal Museum of Local Lore, which is housed in a historic building and features exhibits on the city's history and culture.

In addition to its industrial and cultural attractions, Elektrostal is also known for its vibrant nightlife. The city has a large number of bars, restaurants, and nightclubs, many of which are open until late into the night. The city's residents are known for their love of music and dancing, and the local nightlife scene reflects this.

Despite the significant amount of light pollution in Elektrostal, there are efforts underway to reduce the problem. The city government has implemented a number of initiatives aimed at promoting energy efficiency and reducing waste, including a program to replace traditional streetlights with LED lights. The city also encourages its residents to conserve energy by turning off lights when they are not needed.

Elektrostal is a vibrant and dynamic city in the Moscow Oblast, with a rich industrial and cultural heritage. While its night lights are a major attraction, they also contribute to the problem of light pollution in the area. However, efforts are underway to address the issue, and the city's residents and government are working together to promote sustainable and energy-efficient practices.

Barron Trump: College, gap year, other plans for ‘nepo babies’ with a Florida tie

Will barron trump go to university of pennsylvania like his father donald trump, georgetown like his siblings or nyu.

Now that high school graduations are over, next up for class of 2024? College, a gap year or neither.

Like thousands of children across the U.S., Barron Trump , the only child of former president Donald Trump and former first lady Melania Trump, received his high school diploma and was branded part of the class of 2024. Barron Trump graduated May 17, 2024, from Oxbridge Academy near West Palm Beach, Florida, and both parents attended.

Will Barron Trump go to college ? Will the 6-foot-7 former first son take a gap year? The former first couple has not said much. One possibility could be New York University in Manhattan, where Barron Trump spent much of his childhood — and lived until his father was sworn in as the 45th president in early 2017.

As of Saturday, June 29, it has not been announced where Barron Trump will attend college , but, like many other celebrity children or "nepo babies" − a shortened slang term (aka "nepotism baby") used to describe children or relatives of celebrities or famous people − people are curious about their future and whether they'll follow in their famous parents' footsteps.

Here's a look at other class of 2024 celebrity high school and college graduates with a Florida tie .

A towering figure. Wow! How tall is Barron Trump? Compare his height with other celebrities

Suri Cruise, daughter of Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise

Suri Cruise, the only child of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, graduated from LaGuardia High School in June 2024. According to an E! Online story on June 7, 2024 , Suri Cruise might attend Carnegie Mellon University, based on a TikTok video of the 18-year-old wearing a college choice sweater. Tom Cruise has had a condo in Florida for many years.

Donald Jr., Ivanka, Eric and Tiffany: As Barron Trump college choice looms, here's where his family graduated (and who didn't)

Ryder Fieri, son of Food Network star Guy Fieri

Ryder Fieri, youngest son of Food Network star Guy Fieri and his wife, Lori, graduated from Windsor High School in Windsor, California, in June 2024. Guy Fieri purchased homes in Lake Worth Beach and on Singer Island near West Palm Beach in recent years. He told the Bradenton Herald in 2021 that his family would stay in Northern California at least until his youngest son, Ryder, finished high school.

Guy Fieri has 2 homes in Florida. Get an inside look at the celebrity chef's waterfront homes here

Justin Pippen, son of Chicago Bulls star, NBA legend Scottie Pippen

Justin Pippen, youngest son of Scottie Pippen and Larsa Pippen, graduated from Sierra Canyon High School in California in May 2024. Scottie Pippen is a seven-time NBA All-Star (including six with the Chicago Bulls). In an April 2024 story on espn.com , Justin Pippen formally committed to Michigan and will become a Wolverine in the fall. ESPN reported Justin Pippen chose new coach Dusty May , who led Florida Atlantic to the 2023 Final Four, and the Wolverines over a final list that included Cal, the University of Florida in Gainesville, Stanford and Texas A&M.

Ben Affleck as an astronaut was believeable, but ... Your favorite space movies, like "Armageddon," debunked

Nikko Gonzalez, son of Lauren Sanchez and Tony Gonzalez, future stepson of Jeff Bezos

Nikko Gonzalez, son of journalist Lauren Sanchez (soon to be Mrs. Jeff Bezos , one of the richest men on the planet) and her ex, former NFL player Tony Gonzalez, graduated from college in May 2024. Sanchez, Bezos and Tony Gonzalez attended the commencement ceremony. Bezos and Sanchez moved to Florida, with multiple properties in Indian Creek Village , a private neighborhood known as " Billionaire Bunker ." In 2023, USA TODAY reported Bezos said he wanted to live in Miami to be closer to his parents and the Cape Canaveral operations of  Blue Origin , his space exploration company.

Contributing: Antonio Fins and Kimberly Miller, Palm Beach Post

Sangalang is a lead digital producer for USA TODAY Network-Florida. Follow her on  Twitter  or Instagram at  @byjensangalang . Support local journalism.  Consider subscribing to a Florida newspaper .

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Jeff bezos and lauren sánchez take greece by land, air and sea on mykonos yacht vacation.

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Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez are taking Greece by land, sea and air.

An isle spy tells Page Six that the power couple has been seen on Mykonos, where helicopter pilot Sánchez was spotted taking a whirly-bird for a spin off the duo’s boat, which is filled with “toys,” y’know, like choppers.

Said the fellow traveler: “Jeff was seen coming from the city center in Chora ” — as the tony town is called by locals and in-the-know visitors — “and getting on and off his helicopter onto his smaller support boat.”

The couple was also photographed strolling through the streets of Mykonos hand-in-hand.

The source further said that, “Lauren has been seen flying a helicopter on and off their support boat, where they keep all their toys . . . helicopters, speed boats and other water toys.”

The source also told us that, “Jeff’s keeping the super big boat they live on, on the other side of the island where there is less wind.”

The source was referring to the couple’s famous $500 million superyacht , Koru, which they debuted last summer. Building of the mammoth vessel for the Amazon tycoon began in 2018.

Bezos also reportedly owns a “smaller” $75 million yacht, Abeona, which shadows his bigger boat . (One boat blog explained the concept: “In car terms, this is basically the same as buying a Porsche so you can drive to the garage where your Bugatti is parked.”)

The little ol’ support boat can accommodate 45, including 20 crew.

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Bezos also owns a fleet of helicopters and private planes plus properties galore, of course.

Also on Mykonos as the summer heats up , we hear, is billionaire Jets owner Woody Johnson, who was spotted at fancy beach club Scorpios, after taking a tender from his own yacht.

Bezos and Sánchez have also been seen in Greece dining on the island of Hydra with Bezos’ son Preston.

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Elektrostal, visit elektrostal, check elektrostal hotel availability, popular places to visit.

• Electrostal History and Art Museum

You can spend time exploring the galleries in Electrostal History and Art Museum in Elektrostal. Take in the museums while you're in the area.

• Cities near Elektrostal

• Places of interest
• Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center
• Central Museum of the Air Forces at Monino
• Peter the Great Military Academy
• Bykovo Manor
• Balashikha Arena
• Ramenskii History and Art Museum
• Malenky Puppet Theater
• Balashikha Museum of History and Local Lore
• Pekhorka Park
• Saturn Stadium
• Orekhovo Zuevsky City Exhibition Hall
• Noginsk Museum and Exhibition Center