Jeff Bezos And Blue Origin Travel Deeper Into Space Than Richard Branson

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Jeff Bezos And Blue Origin Travel Deeper Into Space Than Richard Branson

Enlarge this image toggle caption Sean Murphy/AP Sean Murphy/AP

Jeff Bezos has become the second billionaire this month to reach the edge of space, and he did so aboard a rocket built by a company he launched.

Enlarge this image toggle caption Blue Origin Blue Origin

The founder of Amazon, who stepped down as CEO this month, lifted off early Tuesday with three crewmates on the maiden flight of Blue Origin’s New Shepard launch vehicle.

Riding with Bezos on the planned 11-minute flight were brother Mark Bezos as well as the oldest and youngest people ever to fly into space – 82-year-old pioneering female aviator Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen, 18, a physics student. Daemen, whose seat was paid for by his father, Joes Daemen, CEO of Somerset Capital Partners, was put on the crew after the winner of an anonymous $28 million auction for the flight had to postpone due to a scheduling conflict.

The crew took off on a special anniversary

New Shepard lifted off from the company’s facilities in Van Horn, Texas, shortly after 9 a.m. ET.

The date of July 20 for the inaugural flight is significant – it’s the same day in 1969 that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin aboard Apollo 11’s Eagle became the first humans to land on the moon.

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Bragging rights over Branson

New Shepard’s suborbital flight was designed to take the crew past the Kármán line, the internationally recognized boundary of space, at nearly 330,000 feet, or roughly 62 miles above the Earth. That will give Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin — which he founded in 2000 — bragging rights over Virgin Galactic’s Richard Branson, whose flight this month aboard SpaceShipTwo hit a peak altitude of around 282,000 feet, surpassing NASA’s designated Earth-space boundary of 50 miles, but falling well short of the Kármán line.

Blue Origin vs. Virgin Galactic

Besides the altitude, the New Shepard launch had some other key differences with Branson’s July 11 flight: Instead of lifting off from a pad, the Virgin Galactic vehicle was dropped from under a specially designed aircraft at about 50,000 feet before firing its ascent engines. The Virgin Galactic spacecraft also glided back to Earth for a space shuttle-like runway landing.

By contrast, the 60-foot tall New Shepard launched like a conventional rocket, and its capsule was designed to return home dangling from three parachutes in a manner similar to NASA’s human spaceflights of the 1960s and ’70s. However, its booster returned to the pad for a soft touchdown so that it can be reused later. And the capsule, with Bezos and his crewmates aboard, came back to the high plains of Texas using braking rockets, instead of splashing down at sea.

New Shepard, which is fully autonomous, is named after Alan Shepard, who in 1961 became the first American into space.

Elon Musk has hasn’t made it to space, but his company has

With Bezos' flight complete, Elon Musk, the head of SpaceX, is left as the odd man out in the billionaire space race. Even so, Musk’s SpaceX, which has flown astronauts to the International Space Station, is a heavyweight in the commercial space business compared with either Virgin Galactic or Blue Origin.

Branson and Bezos are hoping to tap into the potentially lucrative market for space tourism, while Musk is more focused on working with NASA, gaining market share in the satellite launch industry, and on his dream to send humans to Mars.

Even so, Musk turned up to watch Branson’s flight and has reportedly put down a $10,000 deposit to reserve a seat to fly on a future Virgin Galactic flight, where tickets are thought to go for $250,000 a pop, but it’s unknown if or when he will buckle in and blast off.

Jeff Bezos, Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen reach space, return safely on Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket

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In addition to the flight tests, all sorts of work has been done behind the scenes, Gary Lai, the senior director of the New Shepard design team, said in an interview. “The flights are just kind of the tip of the iceberg, the part that floats above the water that people can see,” he said. “We test the vehicle on the ground, the components, the software, many, many more times than we fly them. Up to the point where, when we do the flight tests, we’re actually pretty confident it’s going to work.”

Elon Musk would rather ‘focus on building Starship’ than travel into space: author

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Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket is set to blast off with the following crew members: Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos, Jeff Bezos’ brother Mark Bezos, Aviation Pioneer Wally Funk and 18-year old physics student Oliver Daemen. Eric Berger, Senior Space Editor at Ars Technica and Author of ‘Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days of SpaceX’ joins Yahoo Finance Live to discuss.

Video Transcript

MYLES UDLAND: Let’s go now to someone who is live on the ground down there in West Texas. Let’s bring in Eric Berger, Senior Space Editor at “Ars Technica” and the author of “Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days that Launched SpaceX.” Eric, thanks so much for jumping on with us this morning. Just kind of set the scene for us down there in Van Horn as we are now looking at about 28 minutes to launch. The latest update.

ERIC BERGER: Yeah, good morning. It’s actually a beautiful day. We’ve got clear skies. The sun is coming up over the mountains. And Jeff Bezos and the rest of the crew members of the New Shepherd mission, the 16th one, just got on board. And so it looks like they’re tracking toward an on-time launch.

ERIC BERGER: I think it’s really the fact that we are entering the era of private human spaceflight. Before Richard Branson’s flight, before this flight, more than 95% of people who had gone into space had been government astronauts on government vehicles, NASA astronauts, Russian astronauts, Chinese astronauts.

From this moment forward, we’re looking at 95% of people going into space on private spacecraft buying a ticket. So it’s really kind of a change. We’re going from the era of government space flight to commercial space flight. And now it’s involving humans. And I agree with you, this really is an important moment.

JULIE HYMAN: Is that, Eric– it’s Julie here, a positive change? In other words, it used to be people like Jeff Bezos when they were kids dreamed of going to space. Many of them, traditionally, have dreamed of going to space as an astronaut, as a public servant. Is that no longer available to them? Or do you think we’ll have to track here?

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ERIC BERGER: We’re kind of right in the middle of it where seeing this sea change from this era of government space flight to era of commercial space flight. The fact of the matter is these private companies, and especially SpaceX with Blue Origin too are moving much more nimbly, using capital far more efficiently.

And so, we’re starting to see them do things that NASA has been unable to do or has been unwilling to do. And I think we’re only going to see it in celebration of that in the future. As these systems start flying, we’ll see how much of a market there is for this suborbital tourism and how that extends into the orbit and the economy that we can build there.

BRIAN SOZZI: Eric, Virgin Galactic, it’s a publicly traded company. Is a good successful launch today for Blue Origin, is it good news for Virgin Galactic or is it bad news?

ERIC BERGER: I think it’s good news because an action on one system kind of reflects poorly on the whole industry. So the shareholders of Virgin Galactic, the employees of Virgin Galactic are very much rooting for New Shepherd. Now, there is definitely a rivalry in between the two companies. They are different experiences. One’s a rocket launch, ones a rocket powered space plane. They both give a few minutes of weightlessness where you can look back on Earth. But an accident this early in the program would be catastrophic for the entire industry.

ERIC BERGER: So Boeing Starliner had a problematic mission about 18 months ago. But they’re flying their Starliner spacecraft again on a demonstration mission to the International Space Station at the end of this month. So it’s scheduled to liftoff on July 30. If that mission goes well, then probably the earliest we would see a crew flight with astronauts on Starliner would be next spring.

And Blue Origin is quite a bit further. They’ve got to finish their new Glenn Rocket. And I think that’s at least a couple of years away. There’s really some big technical hurdles remaining for them. And then they don’t really have any kind of orbital spacecraft. So Blue Origin, I would say is at least five to 10 years away from putting humans into orbit on their own vehicle.

JULIE HYMAN: Eric, I just want to tell people what they’re looking at here next to you as we see the top of the Blue Origin rocket. They were just dropping in Wally Funk, the 82-year-old female aviation pioneer who’s going to be making this voyage to space and will make her the oldest individual to have visited space. Eric, we’ve talked a lot about the bigger significance in this space race, et cetera. I’m curious what you think is technologically most interesting about this particular launch?

ERIC BERGER: I find the most interesting thing about this launch is that this is a reusable capsule and it’s a reusable rocket. So Blue Origin has built a New Shepard system to be able to fly this 25 times. That would be really significant because only SpaceX has built an orbital rocket that can launch and land vertically like this system as well.

And so, the fact that you have two companies, two visionaries, two billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos both saying that reusable launch is the future, that’s a big statement. And these rockets, and especially this one we’re seeing today, is proving that out.

MYLES UDLAND: And then Eric, finally before I let you go, I just want to ask what you think. Maybe you’ve talked to Elon about where he stands on all this, his takeaway on these two events we’ve seen just in the last couple of weeks.

ERIC BERGER: So Elon is much less interested in going to space than he is in building the systems to put large amounts of materials and people into space. So he’s much more focused on his Starship program. That doesn’t mean that he’s not going to one day go into space himself, but he views being an engineer on a much higher level than he does as being an astronaut. So he is much more focused on building Starship than sort of this. I think he kind of looks at this race between Branson and Bezos and maybe sort of laughs a little bit to himself thinking that that’s really not the important game here. There’s a bigger game to be played.

MYLES UDLAND: All right. There you go. Elon Musk, he is just like us. All right, Eric Berger, Senior Space Editor at “Ars Technica,” author of “Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days that Launched SpaceX.” Eric, enjoy the proceedings this morning. Thanks so much for spending some time with us.