Best Day Ever, says Jeff Bezos after his 11-minute space voyage
Days after billionaire Richard Branson took off to space, Jeff Bezos, rated as the world’s richest man, blasted off to space on Tuesday on his rocket ship New Shepard. Bezos and two others were back after 11 minutes, 100 km up.
After the touch-down, Bezos thundered, ‘BEST DAY EVER.’
Bezos was accompanied by his brother Mark Bezos, 82-year-old Wally Funk and a student who is just 18 years old.
The spacecraft blasted off at 6:45 pm IST from a private launch site near Van Horn, Texas. According to the BBC, the capsule separated from its rocket after two minutes into the flight and stormed towards the Karman Line, designated as the boundary of space widely, about 100 km up.
As per the BBC report, passengers experienced about four minutes of weightlessness.
Also read: Why is Bezos eyeing space?
At 82, Funk is the oldest person to travel to space 60 years after she was denied entry into the space program because of her gender, reports said.
Bezos’s flight was a fully autonomous one. It is the world’s first unpiloted suborbital flight with an all-civilian crew, said a Reuters report.
Bezos founded Blue Origin, a maker of ‘fully reusable’ space vehicles, in 2000, with a “vision of enabling a future where millions of people are living and working in space to benefit Earth”. According to the company website, Blue Origin believes that mankind needs to explore and find new energy and material resources beyond this planet. Also, industries that stress Earth can be moved into space sometime in the future, it says.