Tag: Jeff Bezos

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Jeff Bezos says he’s not nervous about space trip

New Shepard crew
Oliver Daemen, Wally Funk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Bezos wear their flight suits during an interview. (CBS This Morning via YouTube)

VAN HORN, Texas — It’s T-minus 1 day for Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ suborbital spaceflight, and he feels fine.

On July 20, the world’s richest individual is due to take a ride on the New Shepard spaceship built by his Blue Origin space venture.

“People keep asking me if I am nervous,” Bezos said today on “CBS This Morning,” during an interview that also included his three crewmates. “I am not really nervous. I am excited. I am curious. I want to know what we are going to learn.”

All four soon-to-be spacefliers seemed in good spirits as the faced the camera in their flight suits.

“We’ve been training,” Bezos said. “This vehicle is ready, this crew is ready, this team is amazing. We just feel really good about it.”

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Blue Origin says spaceflight customers are lining up

New Shepard crew
New Shepard crew members Oliver Daemen, Wally Funk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Bezos line up for a picture. (Jeff Bezos via Instagram)

Jeff Bezos and his crewmates are still finishing up their training for the first-ever crewed spaceflight conducted by Blue Origin, scheduled for July 20, but Bezos’ space venture already has customers lined up for the New Shepard suborbital spacecraft’s future flights.

“We intend to have two more flights in 2021, for a total of three flights, and many more in the future,” Ariane Cornell, Blue Origin’s director of astronaut sales, said today during a briefing at the company’s suborbital launch site in West Texas. “So we have already built a robust pipeline of customers that are interested.”

A good number of those prospects are coming from the auction that Blue Origin wrapped up last month to sell the open seat on the first flight. The winning bid came in at $28 million, but Blue Origin said that person had to defer the trip due to a scheduling conflict. So, the company turned to Dutch teenager Oliver Daemen, who had put in a lower bid but was taken on for the second flight.

Daemen took the spot, and the auction winner will fly later.

Blue Origin hasn’t revealed how much follow-up fliers have been signed up to pay; the price is apparently being negotiated on a case-by-case basis. But CEO Bob Smith suggested that the first flights won’t be cheap.

“We think we had 7,500 people in the auction from over 150 countries,” he said. “Generally, there’s really high interest. So the question really gets down to what’s the price point. … Our early flights are going for a very good price. You saw the interest during the auction was quite high. We had people well into the twenties [$20 million], all very interested. Some of that was skewed, obviously, by the auction.”

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How tech titans gave a boost to space tourism

VSS Unity and its mothership (left) are modeled after SpaceShipOne (right). Photos by Virgin Galactic and Michael Pereckas (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The suborbital spaceships built by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic spaceline may look totally different, but financially speaking, they have something in common: They both have connections to Seattle tech billionaires.

The connection is obvious in the case of Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket ship. Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000, about six years after he founded Seattle-based Amazon — and he has said he sells off a billion dollars in Amazon stock annually to fund his privately held space company.

Today the Federal Aviation Administration said it has issued its formal approval for New Shepard’s launch on July 20 from Blue Origin’s West Texas spaceport, with Bezos and three crewmates seated on board. It’ll be the first crewed mission for the suborbital craft, which has been put through 15 uncrewed test flights over the course of more than five years.

Bezos’ trip is due to take place just days after Branson took a ride on Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo rocket plane, known as VSS Unity. Both trips are meant to blaze a trail for tourists and researchers to get a sample of the space environment, including a few minutes of zero gravity and wide-angle views of the curving Earth beneath the black sky of space.

Blue Origin’s headquarters has been in the Seattle area from the company’s inception. But Virgin Galactic, which is headquartered in New Mexico, has a less obvious connection to the Seattle tech community.

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Blue Origin fuels space feud with Virgin Galactic

Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos
How serious could the suborbital space race between Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos get? (GeekWire Photos)

Jeff Bezos has a longstanding rivalry with SpaceX’s Elon Musk, but now his Blue Origin space venture is upping the ante in its spat with fellow soon-to-be space traveler Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic — and the Twitterverse is not amused.

Today’s escalation from Blue Origin came in the form of a tweet drawing distinctions between a suborbital ride on its New Shepard spaceship and Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipOne rocket plane.

The tweet’s infographic noted that New Shepard would fly above the 100-kilometer (62-mile) altitude that is currently considered the international boundary of outer space, while New Shepard’s target altitude is 50 miles, which is accepted by the Federal Aviation Administration as astronaut territory. New Shepard’s other advantages — including the size of its windows — were noted as well.

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Jeff Bezos’ space venture approaches crucial phase

Jeff Bezos with lunar lander mockup
Jeff Bezos unveils a mockup of Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lunar lander in 2019. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

Jeff Bezos may be easing back from his CEO role at Amazon, but now he’s due to feel the heat at Blue Origin, the privately held space venture he created in the year 2000.

The next 31 days arguably could rank as the most crucial month so far in the history of a space company that’s headquartered in Kent, Wash., but also has employees in locales ranging from Florida and Washington, D.C., to Alabama, Texas and California.

The red-letter date is July 20, the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, when Bezos and three crewmates are scheduled to take the first crewed flight aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital spaceship in West Texas.

But there are a couple of other dates that loom large on Blue Origin’s timeline: The big one is Aug. 4, the Government Accountability Office’s deadline for deciding whether Blue Origin and its space industry partners should be reconsidered for a lunar lander contract from NASA’s Artemis moon exploration program.

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Richard Branson makes his move in billionaire space race

Richard Branson in flight suit
Virgin Galactic's Richard Branson says he’ll be Astronaut 001 on the company’s next test flight. (Virgin Galactic Photo)

The billionaire space race is on: Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson is on the crew for the next test flight of the company’s SpaceShipTwo rocket plane, which is scheduled to cross the 50-mile space frontier as early as July 11. That’s nine days before Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos is planning his own suborbital space trip.

Virgin Galactic’s flight test plan, announced today, sets up a battle for the bragging rights associated with being the first person to ride his own company’s rocket ship into space.

Neither man would be the first billionaire in space. That distinction belongs to veteran Microsoft executive Charles Simonyi, who traveled to the International Space Station in 2007 and 2009.

Moreover, the definition of the space frontier could add an asterisk to the record book: Virgin Galactic sides with the Federal Aviation Administration in defining the space boundary as the 50-mile-high mark. Blue Origin plans to send its New Shepard spaceship beyond the 100-kilometer (62-mile) altitude that serves as the internationally accepted boundary of space, known as the Karman Line.

The height issue came up in an emailed statement from Blue Origin CEO Bob Smith, referring to Branson. “We wish him a great and safe flight, but they’re not flying above the Karman Line and it’s a very different experience,” Smith said.

Whether it’s 50 miles or 100 kilometers, the suborbital race to space is likely to make for a dramatic few weeks, considering the risks that come with testing new space vehicles — not to mention the egos of the billionaire space barons.

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Pioneering woman aviator will go to space with Jeff Bezos

Jeff Bezos and Wally Funk
Aviation pioneer Wally Funk goes wide-eyed when discussing spaceflight with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. (Instagram Video / Jeff Bezos)

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture has rounded out the foursome for its first crewed suborbital spaceflight with a pioneering woman aviator: Wally Funk, one of the “Mercury 13” women who went through testing for spaceflight but never flew to space.

Funk will sit alongside Bezos and his brother Mark, plus the yet-to-be-identified beneficiary of a $28 million charity auction, when Blue Origin’s New Shepard spaceship lifts off from its West Texas launch pad on July 20, the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.

In a video posted to Instagram and YouTube, Bezos talks with the 82-year-old Funk about the flight — and Funk goes wide-eyed when the world’s richest individual asks what she’ll do when it’s finished.

“I will say, ‘Honey, that was the best thing that ever happened to me,’ and give you a hug!” Funk replies as she throws her arms around Bezos.

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Universe Today

FAA OKs Virgin Galactic’s space passenger service

SpaceShipTwo VSS Unity in flight
Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo VSS Unity rocket plane soars high during a test flight in May. (Virgin Galactic Photo)

Virgin Galactic says it’s received the Federal Aviation Administration’s go-ahead to fly customers on its SpaceShipTwo rocket plane, marking a significant step in a commercial rollout that could also feature dueling space billionaires.

The FAA’s clearance came in the form of an update to Virgin Galactic’s five-year-old commercial space transportation operator license, the company said today in a news release. The upgrade was based on an analysis of the results from Virgin Galactic’s most recent suborbital test flight, conducted in May at Spaceport America in New Mexico.

During that flight, two test pilots guided the rocket-powered SpaceShipTwo VSS Unity beyond the 50-mile mark that the FAA considers the boundary of outer space. (That’s lower than the internationally accepted boundary of 100 kilometers or 62 miles, known as the Karman Line.)

“The flight performed flawlessly, and the results demonstrate the safety and elegance of our flight system,” Virgin Galactic CEO Michael Colglazier said. “Today’s approval by the FAA of our full commercial launch license, in conjunction with the success of our May 22 test flight, give us confidence as we proceed toward our first fully crewed test flight this summer.”

Months ago, Colglazier said that four Virgin Galactic employees would join two test pilots on that flight — and that Virgin Galactic’s billionaire founder, Richard Branson, would go on the test flight after that. But that was before Amazon’s billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos, said he planned to ride Blue Origin’s suborbital spaceship on July 20.

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Leave Jeff Bezos in space? Petitions take off

Blue Origin's Jeff Bezos
Blue Origin’s founder, Jeff Bezos, peers out the window of a New Shepard crew capsule mock-up in 2017. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota)

Between an upsurge in antitrust talk and questions about worker turnover, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has plenty to worry about here on Earth. His plans to take a suborbital space ride next month on a rocket ship built by Blue Origin, another company he created, could conceivably add to the angst — and not just because of the regular risks of spaceflight.

Two petitions urging him to stay in space have attracted more than 100,000 signatures between them, and the tally continues to climb at a rate as rapid as a signature a second.

Both petitions were posted to Change.org two weeks ago, after Bezos said he and his brother Mark would board Blue Origin’s New Shepard spaceship on July 20 for an up-and-down flight from the company’s West Texas spaceport. Two yet-to-be-identified riders will join them, including the winner of a $28 million auction benefiting Blue Origin’s nonprofit foundation.

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Virgin Galactic downplays billionaire space race

Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos
How serious could the suborbital space race between Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos get? (GeekWire Photos)

Would Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson try to steal a march on Blue Origin (and Amazon) founder Jeff Bezos when it comes down to which billionaire flies first on their own suborbital spaceship?

There’s been some buzz about that question in the wake of this week’s announcement that Bezos will be among the first people to travel to the edge of space in Blue Origin’s New Shepard capsule on July 20, the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.

Branson was quick to tweet his congratulations when Bezos’ plans came to light, but also told followers to “watch this space.”

And today, Parabolic Arc’s Doug Messier — who’s long reported on Virgin Galactic’s ups and downs from its home base in Mojave, Calif. — quoted an unnamed source as saying that the company was working on a plan to put Branson aboard its VSS Unity SpaceShipTwo rocket plane for a trip beyond 50 miles in altitude over the Fourth of July holiday weekend.

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