It’s also developing, with the help of a couple of longtime NASA contractors, technology to return American astronauts to the surface of the moon, by the 2024 deadline that Donald Trump set and that Joe Biden has so far kept. Richard Branson may have beaten Bezos to space, but Blue Origin is working on an even bigger rocket that could fly people and payloads well beyond the edge of space, into orbit around Earth.

In that sense, as he floated over the Earth, taking in the beautiful view, he was surveying his kingdom, and adding one more dimension to his realm. Bezos benefits when we buy things (Amazon), eat (Whole Foods), read movie trivia (IMDb), rate books (Goodreads), manage our homes (Alexa), catch up on the news ( The Washington Post), and go online (Amazon Web Services). At a press conference after the launch, Bezos thanked Blue Origin's engineers, and then added, “I also want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer, ’cause you guys paid for all this.” Because of Amazon, he is the richest person on Earth, who controls the daily life of so many others here-not just his employees, but the hundreds of millions of us who partake, sometimes grudgingly, in the products he owns. If Bezos were anyone else, the story of his spaceflight, of a dream fulfilled, would be simple and sweet.īut if Bezos were anyone else, he wouldn’t have been able to fulfill this dream at all. He remembers watching Apollo 11’s moon landing on his family’s television as a 5-year-old, and as a high-school valedictorian, he spoke about the importance of space travel. Most people know Bezos primarily as the founder of Amazon-in the least flattering version, an ultra-wealthy boss who overworks his employees and hasn’t always paid his share of federal income taxes. Future Blue Origin customers need only show up a few days before launch for some light training on their fully autonomous ride. Shepard, a military pilot, spent months preparing to fly his NASA capsule. They followed a similar trajectory as Shepard did in 1961, but the Blue Origin experience is thoroughly, well, Amazon-like. The passengers flew on a rocket called New Shepard, named for the astronaut Alan Shepard, the first American to reach space. For this crew, Blue Origin had made spaceflight feel almost as smooth as same-day shipping. The rocket was back on the launchpad, standing tall, after tearing through the atmosphere with a sonic boom. The Blue Origin rocket rose into the sky with a rumble that echoed across the West Texas desert, and about 11 minutes later, it was all over-the passenger capsule parachuted down, and the Bezos brothers, Funk, and Daemen climbed out, grinning widely. The journey was lightning-fast by spaceflight standards. By going first, Bezos wanted to prove that his vehicle is safe, and that Blue Origin is finally ready to make its 11-minute suborbital trips an experience people can buy. Before today, Bezos’s private space company, Blue Origin, had not flown its rocket with any people on board.

This morning, the richest person on Earth boarded a reusable rocket he dreamed up and funded, launched to the edge of space to experience a few minutes of weightlessness, and then came back down.īezos made the trip with three people who decided they trusted him enough with their lives: his brother, Mark Bezos Wally Funk, a storied aviator and Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old fresh out of high school. VAN HORN, Texas-Jeff Bezos really flew to space.

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