Jeff Bezos and Crew Successfully Travel to Space and Back in Blue Origin

Jeff Bezos and three other passengers flew to the edge of space on Tuesday morning and landed safely in the Texas desert aboard his space company’s crew capsule. The NS-16 trip was Blue Origin’s first to carry humans, and it marked the start of commercial space tourism service for the corporation. Blue Origin’s suborbital New Shepard rocket is safe to fly and open for business, according to Flying Bezos, the world’s richest man, who created the company in 2000.

The six-story-tall New Shepard launcher took off under clear skies from its remote launch site in Van Horn, Texas, at 9:12 a.m. ET on Tuesday, with the company’s gumdrop-shaped RSS First Step crew capsule atop. Inside the capsule were Bezos, his brother Mark, aviation icon Wally Funk, and Dutch teen Oliver Daemen, who was Blue Origin’s first paying customer. Before separating from the rocket, the crew capsule accelerated to a peak height of 66 miles at three times the speed of sound. The passengers felt weightless for a brief moment and could see Earth’s curve on the lip of its atmosphere.

“My main mission was accomplished — I didn’t kick anyone,” Bezos said after touching back down to earth. “I was surprised at how easy zero-G was… it was like swimming.”

Funk, 82, became the oldest person to reach space, while Daemen, 18, became the youngest. Bezos has stated that going to space has always been a dream of his since he was a child. After Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson, who flew on his company’s SpaceShipTwo spaceplane on July 11th, he became the second billionaire to ride his own rocket to space.

The New Shepard booster landed vertically on a concrete platform five miles from its launch site, capping the booster’s third trip to space. Blue Origin had undertaken 15 test launches of its New Shepard rocket before Tuesday’s voyage.

The cost of each seat has yet to be revealed, and the corporation has refused to provide any estimates. The rocket’s most recent test flight, which took place in April, was an “astronaut rehearsal,” in which company employees pretended to be passengers in the moments leading up to launch. Blue Origin’s NS-16 flight director Steve Lanius told reporters on Tuesday, “Every mission we’ve conducted so far has been preparing us to put humans on board.”

In the passenger’s seat was a recent high school graduate Daemen, even though originally it was for an anonymous winner of Blue Origin’s June auction. Due to scheduling issues, the winner offered $28 million to fly, but it was rescheduled for a later New Shepard mission. Daemen’s father, the founder, and CEO of a Dutch private equity business had purchased a seat on New Shepard’s in the fall but was instead assigned to the inaugural flight, so he gave his seat to his son.

The flight on Tuesday was a long-awaited triumph for the corporation, which is up against stiff competition from other space companies such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Blue Origin had pitched the Air Force for a multibillion-dollar launch program with New Glenn, a much larger rocket system under development in Florida. Still, SpaceX and United Launch Alliance defeated it. Blue Moon, the company’s proposed human lunar lander, was rejected by NASA in April. Instead, the agency chose SpaceX’s Starship system.

New Shepard is launched from Blue Origin’s Launch Site One facility in Van Horn, Texas. Goddard, a smaller idea that debuted in 2006, was the first prototype of the rocket. New Shepard was launched for the first time in 2015, but it crashed on landing. All of Blue Origin’s previous flights have been successful, allowing the company to send its billionaire founder on the rocket’s first crewed voyage.

Bezos told CNN in an interview Monday morning “We know the vehicle is safe. If the vehicle is not safe for me, it’s not safe for anyone.”