Tag: New Shepard

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Late-night TV skit skewers space billionaires

Jeff Bezos and Owen Wilson
Jeff Bezos (left) gets the “Saturday Night Live” treatment from Owen Wilson. (Blue Origin / NBC Photos)

You know that the billionaire space race has entered the nation’s mainstream when it’s skewered by NBC’s “Saturday Night Live.”

On tonight’s season premiere, guest host Owen Wilson played the starring role in “Star Trek: Ego Quest” as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who in July took a suborbital space ride on the New Shepard rocket built by his own Blue Origin space venture.

SNL’s writers even went so far as to write Wilson’s brother, fellow actor Luke Wilson, into the script as Mark Bezos (credited in the opening titles as “First Mate Jeff Bezos’ Brother, Whose Name Escapes Me”). Other prime-time players portrayed the Bezos brothers’ companions in what it called a “crew of random weirdos,” including Dutch student Oliver Daemen (“Science Officer Rich Kid From the Netherlands”) and 82-year-old aviation pioneer Wally Funk.

“Their mission: to just sort of fly around space, goofing off, in a ship that looks like a penis,” the narrator intones.

Naturally, Bezos and his crew get into a drag race with Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson, who in real life went on his own suborbital space journey on SpaceShipTwo VSS Unity just nine days before Bezos’ flight. The narrator calls it “A Midlife Crisis of Cosmic Proportions.”

But the race ends up going to SpaceX CEO Elon Musk (played by Mikey Day), who blasts Bezos’ craft with photon torpedoes. “Space is only big enough for one weird white billionaire,” Musk says. “So you could say beating you is my … Prime objective.” (Or should that be “Prime Directive”?)

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Blue Origin’s reputation comes under fire from within

Blue Origin HQ
The marquee of Blue Origin's HQ in Kent, Wash. glows on a rainy morning. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

A former employee of Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture has given up her anonymity to lead a campaign accusing the company of laxity when it comes to safety and sexual harassment.

The allegations from Alexandra Abrams, who served as Blue Origin’s head of employee communications until her dismissal in 2019, are detailed in an essay published on Lioness.co and in an interview with CBS News. Abrams said the Lioness essay was written in collaboration with 20 former and current Blue Origin employees who aren’t identified.

Abrams and her co-writers say that the types of gender gaps often seen in the aerospace industry “manifest in a particular brand of sexism,” that dissent is suppressed, and that Bezos’ competition with fellow billionaires Elon Musk and Richard Branson “seemed to take precedence over safety concerns” in planning for crewed spaceflights.

Blue Origin CEO Bob Smith was portrayed as leading the push toward flying people on Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital spacecraft. Bezos and three crewmates rode on the first crewed New Shepard flight in July, and the second crewed flight is due for launch from Blue Origin’s West Texas spaceport in two weeks.

In response to an emailed inquiry, Blue Origin said it takes allegations of sexual harassment seriously and stands by its safety record.

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Two techies will fly on Blue Origin’s next space trip

New Shepard after July flight
Jeff Bezos and other Blue Origin spacefliers pose in front of the New Shepard booster that sent them skyward in July. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture says two successful tech entrepreneurs will be part of the lineup for its next suborbital trip on Oct. 12 — but for now, it’s keeping mum on reports that Star Trek captain William Shatner will also fly.

The first two people on the flight manifest are Planet Labs co-founder Chris Boshuizen and Glen de Vries, the co-founder of Medidata Solutions. De Vries is now the vice chair of life sciences and healthcare at Dassault Systèmes, which acquired Medidata, the world’s most used clinical research platform, in 2019.

Blue Origin said they’ll be joined by two other fliers whose names will be announced “in the coming days.”

The company didn’t disclose how much any of the customers will be paying for their trips — and didn’t address last week’s report by the TMZ celebrity news outlet that the fliers would include Shatner, who played Captain James T. Kirk on the original “Star Trek” series and in a string of movies that followed.

Next month’s suborbital launch from Blue Origin’s West Texas spaceport would follow up on the company’s first crewed spaceflight in July. The riders for that flight included Bezos himself, as well as his brother, Mark; aviation pioneer Wally Funk, who at the age of 82 became the world’s oldest person to go into space; and Dutch student Oliver Daemen, who became the world’s youngest spaceflier at 18.

If Shatner flies next month at the age of 90, he would set a new record as the oldest person to fly in space.

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TMZ says Star Trek’s William Shatner will go to space

William Shatner and New Shepard
Will Star Trek captain William Shatner fly on Blue Origin’s New Shepard spaceship? (Photos: Paramount and Blue Origin)

The next crewed suborbital spaceflight planned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture — which could launch as early as next month — is due to carry Star Trek captain William Shatner, according to the TMZ celebrity news site.

If the report based on unnamed sources is true, that would make Shatner the oldest person to fly in space at the age of 90, besting the record set by 82-year-old aviation pioneer Wally Funk during July’s first crewed flight of Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital spacecraft.

Shatner played Captain James T. Kirk in the original “Star Trek” series and in a series of movies. That gives him at least one thing in common with Bezos. The world’s richest individual also played a part in a Star Trek production: a cameo as an alien Starfleet officer that lasted several seconds in the movie “Star Trek Beyond.”

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New Shepard’s shepherd leaves Blue Origin

Blue Origin team and New Shepard
Blue Origin’s team gathers in front of a New Shepard booster after July’s first crewed suborbital spaceflight. (Blue Origin Photo)

The changing of the guard is continuing at Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture with the departure of Stephen Bennett, a senior vice president who led the team behind the company’s New Shepard suborbital spaceship.

Bennett will become Toronto-based Kepler Communications’ chief operating officer on Sept. 20, Kepler said in a news release.

Blue Origin’s vice president of communications, Linda Mills, told GeekWire in an email that Bennett’s deputy, Phil Joyce, “was promoted and has taken on leadership of the New Shepard team with a seamless transition plan.”

Kepler is rolling out Aether, a connectivity service for space assets in low Earth orbit, or LEO. The Aether system is due to go through flight validation early next year.

“The opportunity to join Kepler as this point in their journey speaks to me on multiple levels,” Bennett said in the news release. “The goal of delivering a LEO network that will provide real-time connectivity to other orbital missions is a bold one, but one that this team has demonstrated they are on track to achieve.”

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New Shepard joins the pantheon of model rockets

New Shepard model rocket
Estes’ New Shepard model rocket uses standard model-rocket launch equipment. (Estes Industries via YouTube)

Rocket fans will soon be able to follow in Jeff Bezos’ footsteps when it comes to ownership of a suborbital New Shepard space vehicle.

Just be warned that everything will be scaled down: The Blue Origin New Shepard model rocket unveiled this week by Estes Industries will be 1/66th scale, and capable of going up 400 feet rather than 62 miles.

At least the price is scaled down as well: Instead of paying out a billion dollars a year to support Blue Origin’s development program for New Shepard as well as the orbital-class New Glenn rocket and advanced projects, buyers will be asked to shell out a mere $69.99.

Estes is partnering with the Club for the Future, Blue Origin’s educational foundation, to offer New Shepard as a STEM teaching tool. A portion of the sales proceeds will go to the club.

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Blue Origin sends art and science to space and back

New Shepard launch
Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital spaceship lifts off for an uncrewed research mission. (Blue Origin via YouTube)

A little more than a month after Amazon founder Jeff Bezos took a rocket ride, his Blue Origin space venture set another New Shepard suborbital spaceship to the final frontier — but this time the high-profile payloads were paintings, not people.

Blue Origin’s 17th New Shepard mission lifted off from the company’s suborbital spaceport in West Texas at 9:31 a.m. CT (7:31 a.m. PT) today, after a couple of countdown holds that provided opportunities for last-minute checks of the rocket and its payloads.

The reusable vehicle that Bezos and three crewmates rode last month was optimized to fly passengers, but the spaceship for today’s flight was optimized to carry research payloads instead. No humans were riding along for this particular rocket ship’s eighth suborbital outing.

The flight followed the standard profile for New Shepard: The hydrogen-fueled booster pushed the capsule to an altitude of 347,434 feet (105.9 kilometers), which is above the 100-kilometer (62-mile) “Karman Line” that marks a widely accepted outer-space boundary.

Minutes later, the booster touched down autonomously on a landing pad not far from the launch site. “Just like she was landing on the moon,” launch commentator Jacki Cortese said.

Meanwhile, the capsule experienced a few minutes of weightlessness, and then descended to a parachute-aided landing in the Texas desert. The flight took 10 minutes from launch to the capsule’s touchdown.

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Blue Origin’s space ticket sales approach $100M

New Shepard crew
Oliver Daemen, Mark Bezos and Jeff Bezos listen to crewmate Wally Funk describe their suborbital space trip. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

VAN HORN, Texas — Blue Origin hasn’t yet revealed how much it’s charging for suborbital space trips, but founder Jeff Bezos said his space venture has already brought in nearly $100 million in private sales.

And those sales were made even before today’s first crewed flight of Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket ship, with Bezos and three crewmates on board.

The first big step in Blue Origin’s sales effort was last month’s auction for an open seat on today’s flight. A yet-to-be-identified bidder won the reservation at a price of $28 million, but Blue Origin said the bidder had to defer that reservation due to a scheduling conflict. That’s how 18-year-old Oliver Daemen wound up flying today. He became the world’s youngest spacefarer in the process.

After the auction, Blue Origin executives contacted some of the bidders who lost out in the auction to offer seats on follow-up flights.

“One thing we found out through the auction process, and what we’ve been doing as private sales — we’re approaching $100 million in private sales already, and the demand is very, very high,” he said during a post-landing briefing at Blue Origin’s West Texas spaceport.

Bezos hinted that Blue Origin would continue with the private-sales approach. “We’re going to keep after that,” he said.

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Jeff Bezos has his ‘best day ever’ in space

Jeff Bezos gives high-five
Jeff Bezos gives Blue Origin astronaut trainer Kevin Sprogue a high-five at the end of his suborbital spaceflight. (Blue Origin via YouTube)

VAN HORN, Texas — As of today, Jeff Bezos is not only the richest person on Earth. He’s the richest person to fly to space as well.

The billionaire and three crewmates — including the world’s oldest space traveler and the youngest — took a 10-minute ride on a reusable New Shepard rocket ship that was built by Blue Origin, the company created by Bezos in 2000.

“There’s a very happy group of people in this capsule!” Bezos could be heard saying just after touchdown. “Best day ever!”

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Space shots give a big boost to tiny Texas town

Blue Origin mural
A mural on a Van Horn building features Jeff Bezos and his brother Mark. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

VAN HORN, Texas — When I last visited this West Texas town in 2006, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture was planning to provide suborbital space trips for paying passengers by 2010.

The bad news for Van Horn is that it’s taken a decade longer than expected for Blue Origin’s space boom to come to town. But the good news is that the economic impact is arguably 10 times as great.

Blue Origin’s 15-year-old environmental assessment, which was the subject of the Federal Aviation Administration hearing I attended in 2006, estimated that 20 to 35 full-time employees would be working at the company’s suborbital launch site a half-hour drive north of Van Horn.

Fifteen years later, the actual figure is 275 employees — due not only to Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital spaceship, which Bezos and three crewmates are scheduled to ride on Tuesday, but also due to the rocket engine testing program that’s based at Launch Site One.

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