Jeff Bezos will be flying to space on the the rocket ship made by his space company, Blue Origin. The flight is scheduled for July 20, just 15 days after he is set to resign as CEO of Amazon.
The billionaire founder of Blue Origin and his brother will be two of the passengers on his company’s first suborbital sightseeing trip on its spacecraft, New Shepard. The trip will last a total of 10 minutes, including the four minutes that passengers will spend above the Karman line. The Karman line marks the recognised boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and space.
The New Shepard rocket-and-capsule combo is designed to autonomously fly six passengers more than 62 miles (100 km) above Earth into suborbital space.
“Ever since I was five years old, I’ve dreamed of traveling to space,” said Jeff Bezos while revealing his space tour plans with brother Mark Bezos on Instagram. “On July 20th, I will take that journey with my brother. The greatest adventure, with my best friend,” he said.
“To see the Earth from space, it changes you,” Bezos was filmed saying in the video he shared on Instagram. “I want to go on this flight because it’s a thing I’ve wanted to do all my life.. It’s a big deal for me,” he added.
Though the company has not announced how much it will sell regular tickets for, Blue Origin said one seat will be given to the winner of a month-long auction that’s currently in progress. The bidding was at $2.8 million Monday morning but it hit $3.2 million after Blue Origin’s announcement.
If all goes according to plan, Bezos will be the first of the billionaire space tycoons to experience a ride aboard the rocket technology that he’s poured millions into developing. Not even Elon Musk, whose SpaceX builds rockets powerful enough to enter orbit around Earth, has announced plans to travel to space aboard one of his companies human-worthy crew capsules.
British billionaire Richard Branson, whose own space company, Virgin Galactic, is planning on conducting flights to suborbital space for ultra-wealthy thrill seekers and competing directly with Blue Origin. Branson has long said he would be among the first passengers aboard Virgin Galactic’s rocket-powered plane, but that flight is expected to take place later in 2021.
SpaceX has a couple of missions in the next 12 months that are to take private citizens to orbit. One is scheduled to launch in September and will carry Jared Isaacman, the billionaire founder of Shift4 Payments, and three other amateur astronauts, on a trip to orbit. A second, booked by the company Axiom Space, will carry three wealthy individuals and an astronaut working for the company to the International Space Station. Musk has said he would eventually want to go to Mars, but he has not announced any plans.
