Jeff Bezos plans to fly into space just days before officially stepping down as CEO of Amazon.com.
It will be the first manned flight by the space company BlueOrigin and is scheduled to take place at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, and go to about 60 miles above the Earth’s surface.
The Bezos brothers will join four other passengers – including two crew members and two pilots – in flight. Pow, to the moon, Jeff!
Bezos, who has sold billions of dollars worth of Amazon shares to fund his space company, will fly his own rocket for the first time in 2021. Jeff Bezos will be among the first crew to fly in a Blue Origin capsule on his own rocket, according to a company press release.
Bezos is putting props on his step and working to build a whole new industry in space tourism, but he realizes that consumers need to open their wallets to buy a seat on a rocket, and someone needs to go first before being one of Blue Origin’s first passengers. He supposes to be an example himself.
As well as being the owner of the rocket , Bezos has raised more than $1.5 million in donations for a new launch pad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Blue Origin also says it will offer a one-seat first flight for the highest bidder, which at the time of the writing of this article, sits at 3.5 million and counting.
Jeff and Mark Bezos will join the winner of the New Shepard seat auction to take part in the flight. Blue Origin is also working on a robotic lunar lander called Blue Moon, which Bezos revealed last month when he dropped a black curtain to reveal a full-size dummy of a lander. In the short term, Bezos said, the company needs to build the necessary space infrastructure to get the job done.
Blue Origin has been courting lucrative government contracts for several years, competing with SpaceX, the rocket company founded and run by Tesla boss Elon Musk, Virgin Galactic, backed by Richard Branson.
Blue Origin was founded by Bezos in 2009, a year after Elon Musk founded Space Exploration Technologies Corp., better known as SpaceX. Blue Origin named the New Shepard program after astronaut Alan Shepard, who exactly 60 years ago became the first American to fly into space. The new Shepard is designed to begin sending humans into suborbital space.
When Bezos announced he would step down as Amazon chief in 2021, he said he wanted to devote more time to his other ventures, including Blue Origin. Bezos said in his announcement that the move gives him “the time and energy I need to focus on other projects,” including Blue Origin, according to a press release.