While it’s unclear how many tens of millions of dollars Daemen spent on the seat, Blue Origin has booked at least one more flight. There’s also Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old Dutch man whose qualification is being the son of a private equity CEO who bid on the seat. Aside from Bezos, the passengers will include his brother Mark, and Wally Funk-an 82-year-old aviator who was passed over to serve as an astronaut in 1961 because she was a woman. While Blue Origin has launched test flights of the New Shepard, this launch will be the first with a crew. Residents of the nearby town Van Horn, where there’s a Holiday Inn and a McDonald’s for visitors, say that Bezos doesn’t come round to socialize that often. Still, there isn’t much for Blue Origin’s 275 employees or 50 contractors to do there. (That’s about 7% of the 420,000 acres reportedly owned by Bezos.) To put that into perspective, that’s about three times the 17 or so square miles of land Amazon owns or leases, according to public filings. One way to reduce the amount of gravitational pull is by launching near the equator-and Jeff Bezos has been buying plenty of land in one of the U.S.’s southernmost areas.īlue Origin’s launch site is located on a 30,000 acre-or about 47-square-mile-tract of land in West Texas outside El Paso. SpaceX’s Falcon9 rocket uses more than 902,000 pounds of fuel to reach suborbital space, for instance. It takes an intense amount of energy to overcome gravity and fly into space. It’s unclear if the timeline for any launch has been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, but a 2019 announcement said that there are 25 planned test flights before a 2024 launch. Blue Origin is the prime contractor and will be responsible for building the reusable vehicle that shuttles the astronauts to the Moon’s surface. Artemis-the twin sister of Greek god Apollo-would be the first spaceflight that brings a woman and a person of color to the Moon, and the first time humans have set foot there in more than 50 years. NASA currently plans on bringing humans back to Earth’s only natural satellite under what’s called Project Artemis, and Blue Origin will be working with SpaceX, Northrop Grumman, and other companies selected by the agency to do it. For one contract, NASA notes that Blue Origin failed to adequately detail conflicts of interest, and said it would have to rely on NASA’s funding-a curious admission considering that Bezos’s net worth is about 10 times the space agency’s annual budget. It’s also won government contracts to take payloads into suborbital space on its aircraft, and others for using NASA’s technology. For one, at least 19 patents are registered under Blue Origin, including one for technology that will aid the takeoff and landing of a vertical craft. Corporate filings from Bezos’s other company, Amazon, disclosed that Blue Origin bought $4.2 million in unnamed consumer goods from the online retailer last year, in addition to the direct funding from the CEO. In that way, it’s much closer to SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket company, which keeps its plans relatively close to the space vest.īut it doesn’t operate in a hermitage. Unlike rival Virgin Galactic, it doesn’t publish any filings that document its financial state or the risks to the company. Here’s what we know about the upcoming Blue Origin flight: A vacuum of information, almostīlue Origin-the space company Bezos founded in 2000-is private, if not secretive. and the Soviet Union, is now funded by private capital and still could have decades more of development. The new space race, some 60 years after the Cold War competition between the U.S. Bezos is set to be the second billionaire space jockey, after Richard Branson rode a Virgin Galactic spacecraft on July 11 past where Earth’s atmosphere ends and the final frontier begins.
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