Jeff Bezos All Set To Fly Out On His Own Rocket To Space Today
- ByAyushi Ray | July 20, 2021
Jeff Bezos all set to fly out on his own rocket to space today. He is set to blast off aboard his company Blue Origin’s New Shepard. The American billionaire is due to fly from a desert site in West Texas on an 11-minute voyage to the edge of space nine days after British rival Richard Branson was aboard his competing space tourism company Virgin Galactic’s successful inaugural suborbital flight Branson got to space first, but Bezos will fly higher – 62 miles (100 km) for Blue Origin compared to 53 miles (86 km) for Virgin Galactic – in what experts call the world’s first all civilian crew. Bezos, founder of ecommerce juggernaut Amazon.com Inc, and his brother and private equity executive Mark Bezos will be joined in the flight by two others – a pioneering female aviator Wally Funk.
“I am excited, but not anxious. We’ll see how I feel when I’m strapped into my seat,” Bezos said in an interview with Fox Business Network on Monday. “We are ready. The vehicle’s ready. This team is amazing. I feel very good about it. And I think my fellow crewmates feel good about it, too,” He said. Funk was one of the so-called Mercury 13 group of women who trained to become NASA astronauts in the early 1960s but was passed over because of her gender. Daemen, Blue Origin’s first paying customer, is set to attend the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands to study physics and innovation management in September. His father heads investment management firm Somerset Capital Partners. Barring technical or weather-related delays, New Shepard is due to blast off around 8 a.m. CDT (1300 GMT) from Blue Origin’s Launch Site One facility some 20 miles (32 km) outside the rural Texas town of Van Horn.
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