Jeff Bezos, who founded the spaceflight company Blue Origin in 2000, is set to take its New Shepard rocket for a ride next week. He’s taking three others with him: his brother Mark, an 82-year-old aviator named Wally Funk, and an 18-year-old high school graduate named Oliver Daemen.
If all goes according to plan, that motley crew will lift off from Blue Origin’s West Texas launchpad at around 9 a.m. ET on Tuesday. The New Shepard rocket will scream through the atmosphere, pressing the passengers into their seats, before releasing the passenger capsule and allowing it to arc past the edge of space.
For about three minutes, Bezos and his companions will feel weightless. They’ll be able to float around the spaceship’s cabin, admiring the Earth’s curvature below them, before gravity begins to pull them back down. After a high-speed plunge through the atmosphere, the capsule should release three parachutes and drift safely to the Texas desert.
New Shepard has flown 15 times, but never with humans on board. This will be Blue Origin’s first passenger flight. Here’s what we know about the soon-to-be space tourists.
Mark Bezos is Jeff Bezos’ younger brother
Mark and Jeff Bezos in 2017.
Amy Harris/Invision/AP
When Jeff Bezos announced that he would be heading to space, he also revealed that he invited his younger brother, Mark. In a video posted to Instagram, Bezos said that he asked his brother to come along “because we’re closest friends.”
Mark, who is six years Jeff’s junior, is a former marketing executive and volunteer firefighter. He’s been involved in the Bezos Family Foundation for over 20 years, and was also an early investor in Amazon, likely making him a millionaire several times over.
Jeff has described his brother as the “funniest guy in my life” and said that when they’re together – often drinking bourbon – “I just laugh continuously.”
Wally Funk is an 82-year-old aviator who trained to go to space in the 1960s
Wally Funk at a Virgin Galactic event in 2010.
MARK RALSTON/AFP via Getty Images
Bezos announced earlier this month that Funk would be Blue Origin’s “honored guest” on its upcoming flight.
In 1961, Funk joined an all-woman space mission dubbed “Mercury 13.” But the program was ultimately scrapped – seemingly for sexist reasons – and Funk never made it to space. Funk later embarked on a long career in flight and says she has taught over 3,000 people to fly.
“No one has waited longer,” Bezos wrote in an Instagram post announcing that Funk was joining the mission. “It’s time. Welcome to the crew, Wally.”
Oliver Daemen is an 18-year-old soon-to-be college student from the Netherlands
Oliver Daemen.
Blue Origin
Daemen will be Blue Origin’s first paying customer – he bid for the seat at an auction last month, ultimately losing out to an anonymous bidder who paid $28 million for the opportunity. But Daemen is flying in that passenger’s place after “scheduling conflicts” arose, Blue Origin said in a blog post on Thursday.
Daemen’s father, Joes Daemen, the CEO of real estate private equity firm Somerset Capital Partners, paid for the seat, according to CNBC.
Daemen graduated from high school in 2020, took a gap year to obtain his pilots license, and will attend college for physics and innovation management this fall.
Daemen will be the youngest person ever to go to space, while Funk will be the oldest.
“I’ve been dreaming about this all my life,” Daemen said in a video posted to Twitter. “I am super excited to experience zero-g and see the world from above.”
Bezos, who founded the company in 2000, will be the first passenger on its New Shepard rocket, along with his brother Mark Bezos, 82-year-old aviator Wally Funk, and 18-year-old Dutch student Oliver Daemen. The group is set to strap into a capsule on the top of the five-story rocket on Tuesday. From that moment to touchdown, all their fates will rely on the rocket and its space capsule.
“Bezos is a risk-taker,” John Logsdon, the founder of George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute and a former member of the NASA Advisory Council, told Insider. “He certainly understands that there are risks involved, and probably has a good handle on how risky it is.”
For the rest of us – who don’t have access to Blue Origin’s rocket design or risk calculations – it’s difficult to say just how much risk Bezos is taking. The company did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story. But a few key factors offer clues.
New Shepard has flown successfully before – 15 times – but never with humans onboard. The rocket has a good test-flight record, and it features an emergency system that can jettison the passenger capsule away from a failing rocket. Plus, the whole trip is only 11 minutes long.
At the same time, however, Bezos will fly with no pilot, and probably no spacesuit. And no matter how safe New Shepard is, spaceflight is always risky. About 1% of US human spaceflights have resulted in a fatal accident, according to an analysis published earlier this year.
“That’s pretty high. It’s about 10,000 times more dangerous than flying on a commercial airliner,” George Nield, a co-author of that report, told Insider. Nield formerly served as the Federal Aviation Administration’s associate administrator and led its Office of Commercial Space Transportation.
“In order to learn how to do this safer, more reliably, and more cost effectively, many people believe we need to keep gaining experience by having more and more of these flights,” he added. “[Bezos] obviously has made the decision that having millions of people living and working in space is something that he strongly believes in, and he wants to do his part to help make that happen in some small way.”
Skimming the very edge of space lowers the risk
Jeff Bezos inside a New Shepard Crew Capsule mockup at the 33rd Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colorado, April 5, 2017.
If all goes according to plan on the day of Bezos’ flight, here’s what it’ll look like: The New Shepard rocket will fire its engines, spewing flame and smoke across the plains of West Texas. As it screams through the atmosphere, the force of the climb and the pull of Earth’s gravity – which will feel three times stronger than normal – will pin the Bezos brothers and their guests into their seats.
After three minutes, the rocket should separate from the capsule and fall back to Earth. The passengers will feel weightless as they clear the boundary of space.
The view from space on New Shepard’s 15th flight, April 14, 2021.
Blue Origin
Bezos and his companions will have just about three minutes in space. During that time, they can unbuckle and float around the cabin, drifting from one window to another to savor the views of Earth on one side of the spaceship and the blackness of space on the other.
As gravity begins to pull the spaceship back to Earth, Bezos and his co-passengers will strap in for a high-speed plunge. They will likely feel a significant jerk as three parachutes balloon into the air to brake the spaceship’s fall.
The New Shepard crew capsule parachutes to a landing at Blue Origin’s Launch Site One in Texas, January 14, 2021.
Blue Origin
The parachutes should carry the capsule to a gentle landing in the Texas desert, where a recovery crew will be waiting.
This type of flight is referred to as suborbital, since the capsule won’t enter orbit around Earth. Blue Origin designed and built New Shepard specifically to carry high-paying customers to the edge of space. The rocket is too small, and its engines don’t have enough thrust, to push itself into orbit.
But keeping the flight short and suborbital comes with pluses: There’s less chance that something will go wrong, and the vehicle is easier to control because its engines are smaller and the rocket is traveling slower than would be needed to reach orbit.
If Bezos’ flight goes well, the new launch system could look more attractive to future space tourists.
New Shepard is thoroughly tested and has an emergency-escape system
Blue Origin’s reusable New Shepard suborbital rocket launches toward space in 2016.
The most nail-biting parts of this spaceflight will probably be when the engines burn for liftoff, when the rocket separates from the capsule, and when the parachutes deploy.
“You have a high-performance piece of machinery in the rocket engine that could break, come apart, do bad things,” Logsdon said.
New Shepard has executed all these maneuvers many times before – just not with people on board. It’s flown 15 times since 2015, with three successful tests of its emergency-escape system, which would jettison the capsule away from a failing rocket.
If a parachute fails to deploy, the capsule is designed to give more thrust to its downward-facing engines to help it land safely. If two chutes fail, a crushable “bumper” section on the bottom of the capsule should absorb the impact of landing.
“The capsule is the most highly redundant and safe spaceflight system, we think, that has ever been designed or flown,” Gary Lai, senior director of New Shepard’s design, said in a Blue Origin video about safety, posted online in April. “In most cases, you have a backup to the backup system.”
Logsdon described the New Shepard testing process as “very thorough” and “slow-paced.” He pointed out that the Space Shuttle’s very first flight had humans on board.
“Compared to the Space Shuttle Program, this is a far less risky undertaking,” Logsdon said.
Flying without spacesuits could add risk, but it may be safer if someone vomits
Ever since the Challenger disaster in 1986 – when the Space Shuttle broke apart during launch, killing all seven crew members – all NASA astronauts have worn pressurized spacesuits for launch and landing.
A sneak peek at the final design of Blue Origin’s New Shepard capsule for suborbital space tourists.
Spacesuits would not have saved those aboard Challenger, but they could save lives if a space capsule experiences a cabin leak yet remains intact.
Blue Origin’s website, however, indicates that New Shepard passengers will wear only a jumpsuit – not a pressurized spacesuit and helmet. According to CNN, there are oxygen masks in the capsule, much like on an airplane, in case the cabin becomes depressurized. The company hasn’t specified what Bezos or his companions will wear, however.
Both Nield and Logsdon said the chance of a cabin leak is very small. So the decision to wear a spacesuit or not depends mostly on the design of the capsule. If it has especially thick skin and strong windows, and if its systems can accommodate hiccups and technical errors without endangering the passengers, then flying without a spacesuit could be safe.
When it comes to flying tourists, it may even be better to skip the spacesuit, since first-time fliers often throw up during launch or landing.
“Especially if you are not a trained and experienced astronaut, wearing a spacesuit could be riskier if you got sick,” Nield said.
If you weren’t sufficiently trained to operate the spacesuit, you could choke on your own vomit.
A fully automated flight with no pilots isn’t necessarily a safety issue
An interior view of Blue Origin’s Crew Capsule mockup at the 33rd Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colorado, April 5, 2017.
“Its design does not allow anybody to do much flying,” Logsdon said.
That’s not necessarily more risky than a rocket that requires a pilot, as long as the passengers are properly trained on what to do in an emergency.
Still, this fully automated launch system is relatively new, and lots of things can go wrong during early flights. Rocket failures can often be traced back to small errors across all kinds of hardware and software. It is rocket science, after all.
“Until we get lots of experience, like we’ve had with millions of airplane flights over the years, then there’s going to be some learning involved. And we’re going to get some surprises along the way. And there’s going to be some more accidents or incidents in future years,” Nield said. “With cars and boats and planes and trains, people die every year. And spaceflight is not going to be any different when it comes to that.”
This post has been updated with new information. It was originally published on June 13, 2021.
Jeff Bezos, the richest person on Earth, is about to fly to the edge of space.
The billionaire founder of Amazon and Blue Origin is preparing to ride a New Shepard rocket up to the Kármán line – an imaginary boundary 62 miles (100 kilometers) above sea level, where many experts say space begins. There, he’ll experience weightlessness and stunning views of Earth for about three minutes.
The Blue Origin launch system has flown successfully 15 times, but never with people on board. This will be its first passenger flight. The rocket is scheduled to lift off from Blue Origin’s launch site in Texas at around 8 a.m. CT (9 a.m. ET) on Tuesday.
“To see the Earth from space, it changes you. It changes your relationship with this planet, with humanity,” Bezos said in an Instagram video announcing the launch. “I want to go on this flight because it’s a thing I’ve wanted to do all my life. It’s an adventure. It’s a big deal for me.”
Bezos won’t be flying solo. His brother Mark is set to join him, along with Wally Funk, an 82-year-old aviator who trained to go to space in the 1960s but was ultimately denied the opportunity because she was a woman. An as-yet-unidentified multimillionaire won an auction for the fourth seat, with the proceeds going to Blue Origin’s foundation, Club for the Future.
Watch Jeff Bezos and his companions fly to the edge of space
Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin employees celebrate the New Shepard rocket booster’s first landing.
According to Blue Origin, there won’t be any “public viewing areas” in the vicinity of the launch site, but the company will stream the spaceflight live on its website.
The broadcast is set to start at 6:30 a.m. CT (7:30 a.m. ET), about 90 minutes before liftoff. We will embed that video feed here once it’s available.
A rendering of the final design for Blue Origin’s New Shepard capsule.
If all goes according to plan, the New Shepard rocket will fire its engines to heave itself off the launchpad. As Bezos and his guests scream through the atmosphere, the force of the climb and the pull of Earth’s gravity – which will feel three times stronger than normal – will pin them to their seats.
After three minutes, the rocket booster should fall away from the capsule that holds the passengers. That capsule should continue arcing above the Earth, and Bezos and his companions will feel weightless.
They’ll have three minutes to unbuckle, float around the cabin, and savor the views of the planet curving below. Then gravity will pull the spaceship into a high-speed plunge back to Earth. Three parachutes should balloon into the air to brake the spaceship’s fall, carrying the capsule to a gentle landing in the Texas desert. A recovery crew will be waiting.
The entire flight should last 11 minutes.
Richard Branson launched to space first, but he didn’t pass the Kármán line
Richard Branson floats in space aboard Virgin Galactic’s rocket plane.
Virgin Galactic
Richard Branson, the billionaire founder of Virgin Galactic, flew aboard his company’s space plane on Sunday. Though Branson insists there’s no competition between him and Bezos, Virgin Galactic changed its launch schedule in a way that sent Branson to the edge of space before Bezos.
“They’re not flying above the Kármán line and it’s a very different experience,” Blue Origin CEO Bob Smith told The New York Times after Branson announced his flight.
A still image from video shows Virgin Galactic’s rocket plane ascending to the edge of space with Richard Branson and his crew onboard, July 11, 2021.
Blue Origin went after Virgin Galactic more directly on Twitter two days before Branson’s launch, sharing a graphic comparing the company’s space plane unfavorably to Blue Origin’s rocket.
“From the beginning, New Shepard was designed to fly above the Kármán line so none of our astronauts have an asterisk next to their name,” Blue Origin’s tweet said. “For 96% of the world’s population, space begins 100 km up at the internationally recognized Kármán line.”
The 4% the tweet refers to is the US. Both NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration have awarded astronaut wings to pilots who flew past 50 miles.
When Oliver Daemen blasts off on July 20, he’ll be making history as the youngest person to travel to space.
The Dutch teen will join Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos, Bezos’ brother Mark, and aviator Wally Funk aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard spacecraft, which will be carrying human passengers for the first time ever.
Daemen, who is currently 18, is Blue Origin’s first paying customer – he bid for the seat at an auction last month, ultimately losing out to an anonymous bidder who paid $28 million for the opportunity. But Daemen is flying in that passenger’s place after “scheduling conflicts” arose, Blue Origin said in a blog post on Thursday.
In a video posted to Twitter, Daemen said he’s “super excited” to go into space.
“I’ve been dreaming about this all my life,” he said. “I am super excited to experience zero-g and see the world from above.”
According to Dutch news service RTL Nieuws, Daemen has already left for Texas, where New Shepard will launch, in order to complete astronaut training ahead of liftoff on Tuesday.
So who is Oliver Daemen and how did he become a passenger on the highly anticipated spaceflight? Here’s what we know so far.
Daemen is the son of Joes Daemen, the CEO of a private equity firm
Joes Daemen founded Somerset Capital Partners, a real estate private equity firm, in 2005. The firm is based in Oisterwijk, Netherlands.
According to CNBC, Daemen participated in the auction and had already secured a seat on Blue Origin’s second flight, but the company “moved him up” when the auction winner deferred. Daemen’s father paid for the seat, though the company hasn’t disclosed how much he paid, CNBC reports.
He’ll be a college freshman in the fall
Daemen graduated high school in 2020 and took a gap year – beginning this September, he’ll attend the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands where he’ll study physics and innovation management, according to Blue Origin.
He’s a fan of underwater adventures and water sports
If Daemen’s Instagram account is any indication, he’s spent much of his free time on the water. Over the years, he’s posted pictures of himself snorkeling, surfing, and wakeboarding.
He’s rubbed elbows with Dutch celebrities
Daemen posted a photo to his Instagram account in 2018 of him, his sister, DJ Martin Garrix, and Formula 1 driver Max Verstappen.
He’s fascinated with flight and outer space
Daemen spent his gap year working on getting his pilots license, and this trip to space is the culmination of a lifelong interest, according to Blue Origin.
“Flying on New Shepard will fulfill a lifelong dream for Oliver, who has been fascinated by space, the Moon, and rockets since he was four,” the company said.
The 57-year-old Bezos has a penchant for unusual adventures, hobbies that take him on days-long horseback rides or to the bottom of the ocean. In fact, his next voyage will take him to the outer reaches of Earth’s gravitational pull. On July 20, Bezos, his brother, and two other passengers will take an 11-minute trip to space aboard a Blue Origin rocket.
But the space voyage is the latest – and arguably most extreme – way Bezos has spent his time and money over the years.
Bezos once went on a 50-mile horseback ride through West Texas
Accompanied by his father, Mike, and his brother Mark, Bezos rode for 50 miles on horseback.
“Three days, super fun, my butt hurt,” Bezos said during an interview with Mark at a Summit leadership event in 2017.
Mark Bezos shared a photo of his brother sleeping in a sleeping bag on the ground during the trip, his pillow covered in a ring of frost.
“This is when you know it’s good to be a mammal,” Bezos said.
He traveled to the bottom of the ocean to retrieve pieces of Apollo 11
In 2013, Bezos, his brother, his brother-in-law, and his parents spent 30 days at sea recovering pieces of the engine of the Apollo 11 spacecraft, which took the first humans to the moon.
“We’ve seen an underwater wonderland – an incredible sculpture garden of twisted F-1 engines that tells the story of a fiery and violent end, one that serves testament to the Apollo program,” Bezos wrote of the experience.
Bezos has always been passionate about Apollo 11, and even timed his space journey to the iconic mission: July 20 is the same day Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped foot on the moon in 1969.
He once climbed to the top of one of Amazon’s wind turbines
In 2017, Bezos shared a video on Instagram to celebrate the opening of one of Amazon’s wind farms. Equipped only with a harness and a hard hat, Bezos stood on top of a turbine and smashed a bottle of bubbly.
“Fun day christening Amazon’s latest wind farm,” he wrote.
A post shared by Jeff Bezos (@jeffbezos)
He’s gone cave-exploring
During Bezos’ 2017 interview with his brother, Mark Bezos shared photos of Bezos rappelling hundreds of feet down into a cave.
Accompanied by their brother-in-law, Steve, Bezos’ now ex-wife, MacKenzie Scott, and a friend, the two brothers snapped a group photo at the bottom where they’re surrounded by stalagmites.
“That was a great trip,” Bezos said. “You don’t have to worry about checking your phone there. No radio signals down there.”
He went dog-sledding in the Arctic
To celebrate Earth Day in 2018, Bezos shared a video of himself being pulled behind six dogs through a snowy forest in the Arctic.
“Dog sledding above the Arctic Circle in northern Norway,” Bezos wrote. “Apollo astronaut Jim Lovell says it’s not that you go to heaven when you die, but ‘you go to heaven when you’re born.’ Earth is the best planet in our solar system – by far. We go to space to save the Earth.”
He’ll be joined by his brother, an unnamed passenger who placed the winning bid of $28 million in an auction for the seat last month, and Wally Funk, an 82-year-old aviator who trained to go to space in the 1960s but was ultimately denied the opportunity because she was a woman.
“I want to go on this flight because it’s a thing I wanted to do all my life,” Bezos said in a video posted to Instagram. “It’s an adventure – it’s a big deal for me.”
After weeks of flying rumors, Richard Branson has finally confirmed that he’s aiming to reach the edge of space before Jeff Bezos.
The two billionaires both founded their own spaceflight companies – Bezos started Blue Origin in 2000 and Branson created Virgin Galactic in 2004 – with the ultimate dream of getting to space themselves. Their personal space race might end next weekend.
That’s because Virgin Galactic announced Thursday that it’s planning to launch Branson aboard its next test flight, as early as July 11. Bezos won’t be climbing aboard his company’s New Shepard rocket until July 20.
“I’ve always been a dreamer. My mum taught me to never give up and to reach for the stars,” Branson said on Twitter. “On July 11, it’s time to turn that dream into a reality aboard the next @VirginGalactic spaceflight.”
Richard Branson poses with the SpaceShipTwo, a six-passenger two-pilot vehicle meant to ferry people into space, in Mojave, California, February 19, 2016.
Branson will fly as a mission specialist – an employee playing the role of a future passenger. He’ll be joined by three other mission specialists: Beth Moses, Virgin Galactic’s chief astronaut instructor; Colin Bennett, the company’s lead operations engineer; and Sirisha Bandla, vice president of government affairs and research.
Pilots Dave Mackay and Michael Masucci will ferry the four mission specialists to the edge of space aboard the company’s VSS Unity vehicle – one of its SpaceShipTwo space planes. This will be Virgin Galactic’s first fully crewed flight, though the company has flown humans to the edge of space three times now.
Racing to the edge of space
VSS Unity after detaching from its mothership during a May 22 test flight.
Virgin Galactic
There’s some debate about where space begins. Both Branson and Bezos will be flying in a grey area. Neither will enter orbit around the Earth – making these flights “suborbital.”
Bezos’s spaceship should take him just above the Kármán line – an imaginary boundary 62 miles (100 kilometers) above sea level, where some people say space begins. He’ll experience three minutes of weightlessness, then descend back to the ground.
A New Shepard rocket lifts off from Blue Origin’s West Texas launchpad.
Virgin Galactic has not shared the planned altitude for Branson’s flight, but the VSS Unity has never flown past the Kármán line. Its most recent crewed test flight, in May, soared 55 miles high.
Both Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin ultimately aim to ferry paying customers to these suborbital heights.
“I truly believe that space belongs to all of us,” Branson said in a statement. “As part of a remarkable crew of mission specialists, I’m honoured to help validate the journey our future astronauts will undertake and ensure we deliver the unique customer experience people expect from Virgin.”
In its press release, Virgin Galactic said it would share a global livestream of next weekend’s flight.
Jeff Bezos, his brother Mark, and two unnamed people – at least one of whom is a multimillionaire – are about to place their lives in the hands of Blue Origin’s rocket engineers.
Bezos, who founded the company in 2000, announced on Monday that he and his brother would be the first passengers on its New Shepherd rocket, along with the highest bidder for the third seat. The as yet unnamed winner of that auction bid $28 million on Saturday to go on the trip. (The money will go to Blue Origin’s foundation, Club for the Future.) A fourth person will join them as well.
The group will strap into a capsule on the top of the five-story rocket as early as July 20.
“Bezos is a risk-taker,” John Logsdon, the founder of George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute and a former member of the NASA Advisory Council, told Insider. “He certainly understands that there are risks involved, and probably has a good handle on how risky it is.”
For the rest of us – who don’t have access to Blue Origin’s rocket design or risk calculations – it’s difficult to say just how much risk Bezos is taking. The company did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story. But a few key factors offer clues.
New Shepard has flown successfully before – 15 times – but never with humans onboard. The rocket has a good test-flight record, and it features an emergency system that can jettison the passenger capsule away from a failing rocket. Plus, the whole trip is only 11 minutes long.
At the same time, however, Bezos will fly with no pilot, and probably no spacesuit. And no matter how safe New Shepard is, spaceflight is always risky. About 1% of US human spaceflights have resulted in a fatal accident, according to an analysis published earlier this year.
“That’s pretty high. It’s about 10,000 times more dangerous than flying on a commercial airliner,” George Nield, a co-author of that report, told Insider. Nield formerly served as the Federal Aviation Administration’s associate administrator and led its Office of Commercial Space Transportation.
“In order to learn how to do this safer, more reliably, and more cost effectively, many people believe we need to keep gaining experience by having more and more of these flights,” he added. “[Bezos] obviously has made the decision that having millions of people living and working in space is something that he strongly believes in, and he wants to do his part to help make that happen in some small way.”
Skimming the very edge of space lowers the risk
Jeff Bezos inside a New Shepard Crew Capsule mockup at the 33rd Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colorado, April 5, 2017.
If all goes according to plan on the day of Bezos’ flight, here’s what it’ll look like: The New Shepard rocket will fire its engines, spewing flame and smoke across the plains of West Texas. As it screams through the atmosphere, the force of the climb and the pull of Earth’s gravity – which will feel three times stronger than normal – will pin the Bezos brothers and their guests into their seats.
After three minutes, the rocket should separate from the capsule and fall back to Earth. The passengers will feel weightless as they clear the boundary of space.
The view from space on New Shepard’s 15th flight, April 14, 2021.
Blue Origin
Bezos and his companions will have just three minutes in space. During that time, they can unbuckle and float around the cabin, drifting from one window to another to savor the views of Earth on one side of the spaceship and the blackness of space on the other.
As gravity takes hold again and the spaceship begins to fall back to Earth, Bezos and his co-passengers will strap in for a high-speed plunge. They will likely feel a significant jerk as three parachutes balloon into the air to brake the spaceship’s fall.
The New Shepard crew capsule parachutes to a landing at Blue Origin’s Launch Site One in Texas, January 14, 2021.
Blue Origin
The parachutes should carry the capsule to a gentle landing in the Texas desert, where a recovery crew will be waiting.
This type of flight is referred to as suborbital, since the capsule won’t enter orbit around Earth. Blue Origin designed and built New Shepard specifically to carry high-paying customers to the edge of space. The rocket is too small, and its engines don’t have enough thrust, to push itself into orbit.
But keeping the flight short and suborbital comes with pluses: There’s less chance that something will go wrong, and the vehicle is easier to control because its engines are smaller and the rocket is traveling slower than would be needed to reach orbit.
If Bezos’ flight goes well, the new launch system could look more attractive to future space tourists.
New Shepard is thoroughly tested and has an emergency-escape system
Blue Origin’s reusable New Shepard suborbital rocket launches toward space in 2016.
The most nail-biting parts of this spaceflight will probably be when the engines burn for liftoff, when the rocket separates from the capsule, and when the parachutes deploy.
“You have a high-performance piece of machinery in the rocket engine that could break, come apart, do bad things,” Logsdon said.
New Shepard has executed all these maneuvers many times before – just not with people on board. It’s flown 15 times since 2015, with three successful tests of its emergency-escape system, which would jettison the capsule away from a failing rocket.
If a parachute fails to deploy, the capsule is designed to give more thrust to its downward-facing engines to help it land safely. If two chutes fail, a crushable “bumper” section on the bottom of the capsule should absorb the impact of landing.
“The capsule is the most highly redundant and safe spaceflight system, we think, that has ever been designed or flown,” Gary Lai, senior director of New Shepard’s design, said in a Blue Origin video about safety, posted online in April. “In most cases, you have a backup to the backup system.”
Logsdon described the New Shepard testing process as “very thorough” and “slow-paced.” He pointed out that the Space Shuttle’s very first flight had humans on board.
“Compared to the Space Shuttle Program, this is a far less risky undertaking,” Logsdon said.
Flying without spacesuits could add risk, but it may be safer if someone vomits
Ever since the Challenger disaster in 1986 – when the Space Shuttle broke apart during launch, killing all seven crew members – all NASA astronauts have worn pressurized spacesuits for launch and landing.
A sneak peek at the final design of Blue Origin’s New Shepard capsule for suborbital space tourists.
Spacesuits would not have saved those aboard Challenger, but they could save lives if a space capsule experiences a cabin leak yet remains intact.
Blue Origin’s website, however, indicates that New Shepard passengers will wear only a jumpsuit – not a pressurized spacesuit and helmet. According to CNN, there are oxygen masks in the capsule, much like on an airplane, in case the cabin becomes depressurized. The company hasn’t specified what Bezos or his companions will wear, however.
Both Nield and Logsdon said the chance of a cabin leak is very small. So the decision to wear a spacesuit or not depends mostly on the design of the capsule. If it has especially thick skin and strong windows, and if its systems can accommodate hiccups and technical errors without endangering the passengers, then flying without a spacesuit could be safe.
When it comes to flying tourists, it may even be better to skip the spacesuit, since first-time fliers often throw up during launch or landing.
“Especially if you are not a trained and experienced astronaut, wearing a spacesuit could be riskier if you got sick,” Nield said.
If you weren’t sufficiently trained to operate the spacesuit, you could choke on your own vomit.
A fully automated flight with no pilots isn’t necessarily a safety issue
An interior view of Blue Origin’s Crew Capsule mockup at the 33rd Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colorado, April 5, 2017.
“Its design does not allow anybody to do much flying,” Logsdon said.
That’s not necessarily more risky than a rocket that requires a pilot, as long as the passengers are properly trained on what to do in an emergency.
Still, this fully automated launch system is relatively new, and lots of things can go wrong during early flights. Rocket failures can often be traced back to small errors across all kinds of hardware and software. It is rocket science, after all.
“Until we get lots of experience, like we’ve had with millions of airplane flights over the years, then there’s going to be some learning involved. And we’re going to get some surprises along the way. And there’s going to be some more accidents or incidents in future years,” Nield said. “With cars and boats and planes and trains, people die every year. And spaceflight is not going to be any different when it comes to that.”
Bidding for a seat alongside Jeff Bezos onboard New Shepard, the Blue Origin rocket due to blast off on July 20, has officially closed ahead of a live auction on Saturday.
The highest bid at the closing of registration on Thursday was $4.8 million, according to Blue Origin’s website. The live auction will take place on Saturday, June 12, at 12:45 p.m. EDT.
Jeff Bezos, who owns Blue Origin, announced on Monday he would be on the first human flight of New Shepard along with his brother. Pre-auction bidding has been open since May, and before Bezos’ announcement the highest bid was $2.8 million.
The flight will last just 11 minutes, taking the passengers to the edge of space. Bezos and the other passengers will be weightless and able to float about the cabin for roughly three minutes, as reported by Insider’s Morgan McFall-Johnsen.
New Shepard can carry six people, but so far only Bezos, his brother Mark Bezos, and the auction winner have been confirmed as passengers.
The billionaire space race appears to be in full swing, and it’s getting close. Jeff Bezos and Sir Richard Branson may both have the edge of space in their sights next month.
Bezos announced on Monday that he plans to fly into space aboard the New Shepard rocket developed by Blue Origin, the aerospace company he founded in 2000. The launch is set for July 20.
The following day, a report from Douglas Messier, who runs the longtime space blog Parabolic Arc, indicated that Virgin Galactic may be racing to launch its own founder, Branson, before Bezos. A “source who requested anonymity” told Messier that the company plans to fly Branson on a test flight of its SpaceShipTwo rocket plane over the July 4 weekend. That would poise Branson to beat Bezos to space by a narrow two weeks.
According to Messier’s source, the company began making those plans in response to Blue Origin setting the date for its first crewed flight. Blue Origin made that announcement on May 5 – long before Bezos shared that he would be on board.
Insider was not able to independently confirm Messier’s report. But in a statement to Insider, a spokesperson for Virgin Galactic did not deny the report’s claims.
“At this time, we have not determined the date of our next flight,” the spokesperson said.
Branson’s flight is “expected in the summer months,” the spokesperson added, as is a separate test flight with four “mission specialists” – employees playing the role of future passengers.
Virgin Galactic has previously stated that the mission specialists would fly before Branson. But as of Wednesday, the spokesperson did not respond to a question about which of the two flights would come first.
“One could easily imagine just sort of swapping the flights, or having Richard Branson fly in one of those four seats, just as a test subject, if you will,” George Nield, a former associate administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, where he led its Office of Commercial Space Transportation, told Insider.
Branson has “been in some pretty risky things in his career,” Nield added. “And he obviously believes in this program. If he’s comfortable that everything’s good and is willing to go himself, then more power to him.”
“It’s kind of amusing, these billionaires entertaining themselves by being on the first flights of their vehicles,” John Logsdon, the founder of George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute and a former member of the NASA Advisory Council, told Insider. “Starship is supposed to do an orbital test, too. Is Elon [Musk] going to take the bait and fly on that?”
Launching Branson by July 4 is ‘very doable’
A SpaceShipTwo space plane returns to Earth after a supersonic flight.
Virgin Galactic
Virgin Galactic could easily get through the paperwork to fly Branson by July 4, according to Nield.
“To me, it looks absolutely very doable,” he said, though he emphasized that he is not privy to communications between Virgin Galactic and the FAA, which licenses commercial rocket launches.
Virgin Galactic might have to modify its license with the FAA in order to fly Branson. The modification would allow the company to fly “participants” as well as crew members (in this case, pilots and mission specialists). But Nield says that modification would be simple and quick, as long as the data from the last flight doesn’t reveal any major issues.
“The change in the license is just to say: ‘delete paragraph five,'” Nield said. “So it’s not a big deal.”
Branson could even get a new role as a crew member – acting as a mission specialist, for example. Then Virgin Galactic may not have to modify its license at all in order to fly him.
“In my opinion, there is nothing preventing Richard Branson from also flying as a member of the flight crew,” Nield said. “He is an employee of the company, and they can assign him whatever duties they want to. That’s not something the FAA gets involved in. That’s up to the company.”
When Insider asked about the report, an FAA spokesperson declined to comment on whether Virgin Galactic was pursuing a launch next month. Instead, the agency pointed out the “participant” license modification.
It’s not clear how much Virgin Galactic would have to change or speed up its original plans in order to get Branson to space before Bezos.
“If you hurry there’s always the possibility of cutting corners, but the people that are managing the flight have a pretty high incentive not to kill their boss,” Logsdon said.
Jeff Bezos is preparing to rocket into space on July 20, but he won’t be there for very long. With Earth shining outside the windows, Bezos will float around the cabin of his company’s New Shepard spaceship for just three minutes before he has to strap into his seat again and fall back to the ground.
Blue Origin, the rocket company that Bezos founded in 2000, plans to use this launch system to carry tourists up to the edge of space. New Shepard’s goal is simple: give paying customers the ride of their lives. Passengers will get a few minutes of stunning views out of the largest windows of any spaceship in the world.
This is the first launch system designed for that purpose, and Bezos will be among the first people to fly on it, alongside his brother Mark and the highest bidder for the third seat. Combined, these factors make this flight unlike any other before it.
“Ever since I was five years old, I’ve dreamed of traveling to space,” Bezos said in a Monday Instagram post announcing his plans to rocket into space.
“I want to go on this flight because it’s a thing I wanted to do all my life. It’s an adventure – it’s a big deal for me,” he added in an accompanying video.
In this dream-realizing flight of Bezos’s, there will be no pilot, since the process is automated – and perhaps not even spacesuits either. Here’s what to expect.
3 minutes of weightlessness
Blue Origin’s reusable New Shepard suborbital rocket launches toward space in 2016.
On launch day, Bezos, his brother, and a to-be-determined multimillionaire will climb into the round, spacious cabin of the New Shepard and strap in. If all goes according to plan, the rocket will then fire its engines, spewing flame and smoke across the plains of West Texas, in order to heave itself off the launchpad and into the skies.
As New Shepard screams through the atmosphere, the force of its climb and the pull of Earth’s gravity will pin the Bezos brothers and their guest into their reclining seats.
After just three minutes, they will suddenly feel weightless. They’ll have another three minutes to unbuckle and float around the cabin, drifting from one window to another. Those windows, which make up one-third of the capsule’s surface, will show the passengers the curve of Earth on one side of the spaceship and the blackness of space on the other.
The view from space on New Shepard’s 15th flight, April 14, 2021.
Blue Origin
Astronauts have a term for the feeling of awe this view of Earth can inspire: “the Overview Effect.”
“When we look down at the Earth from space, we see this amazing, indescribably beautiful planet. It looks like a living, breathing organism. But it also, at the same time, looks extremely fragile,” Ron Garan, an astronaut who spent 177 days in space, explained in a 2013 documentary film titled “Overview.”
He added: “Anybody else who’s ever gone to space says the same thing because it really is striking and it’s really sobering to see this paper-thin layer and to realize that that little paper-thin layer is all that protects every living thing on Earth from death, basically.”
Briefly, for just a minute or two, the New Shepard spaceship should clear the Kármán line – an imaginary boundary 62 miles (100 kilometers) above sea level, where space begins.
Then as gravity takes hold again and the spaceship begins to fall back to Earth, Bezos and his co-passengers will strap in for a high-speed plunge through the atmosphere. Then the capsule should deploy three parachutes – likely giving the passengers a significant jerk as the chutes balloon into the air to brake the spaceship’s fall.
The New Shepard crew capsule parachutes to a landing at Blue Origin’s Launch Site One in Texas, January 14, 2021.
Blue Origin
After that, the parachutes should carry the capsule to a gentle landing in the Texas desert, where a recovery crew will be waiting to retrieve the Bezoses and their companion.
Meanwhile, the rocket booster will fall back to Earth separately, fire its engines to slow itself to about 5 mph, and self-land on a concrete pad, to be restored and fly again another day.
The New Shepard booster lands after the vehicle’s fifth flight, May 2, 2019.
The whole journey will last about 11 minutes. That’s because New Shepard is a suborbital rocket. It’s too small, and its engines don’t have enough thrust, to push itself into orbit. So any tourists riding it, including Bezos, will just get to peek above the edge of space.
Another rocket company, Virgin Galactic, has flown people on similar suborbital flights before. But their missions require pilots to land their plane-like vehicle. For New Shepard, the entire flight is automated, so there will be no pilots or professional astronauts on board.
No spacesuits, either?
A dummy called Mannequin Skywalker flies onboard the New Shepard in a Blue Origin flight suit, January 14, 2021.
Blue Origin
Blue Origin hasn’t specified whether Bezos or his companions will wear a pressurized spacesuit and helmet during their flight. But the company’s website indicates that New Shepard passengers will wear only a jumpsuit.
NASA astronauts and their international counterparts all wear pressurized spacesuits when they launch or land. NASA started requiring this after the Challenger disaster in 1986, when the Space Shuttle broke apart during launch, killing all seven crew members.
Spacesuits probably would not have saved the people aboard Challenger, but they could save lives if a space capsule happens to experience a cabin leak yet remain intact.
Blue Origin did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the upcoming flight. The New Shepard has flown successfully 15 times and has twice tested an emergency-escape system that should jettison the capsule and its passengers away from a failing rocket.
