This is a sub-orbital flight which will be offered to tourists, although this first one might have Bezos himself riding on it.
Which people? Can we vote on who gets launched into space?
The article says:
The astronauts are likely to include company personnel, but one seat is being auctioned online.
Almost certainly he’ll be on it. You don’t spend billions on this kind of thing just to let everyone else have all the fun. I understand Branson is going to be on the first flight of his rocket with paying customers.
I volunteer Elon Musk.
You do realize that whoever it is, they’re just going to come back in about 15 minutes?
Elon Musk has his own spaceships. Which (so far) are far more advanced than Jeff Bezos’ spaceships; people who have gone into space using Elon Musk’s spaceships have stayed up there for months, not minutes.
Okay then, nevermind.
Not only that, they’re orbit-capable. The flight is longer, yes, but the re-entry is likely to be a lot less painful from the trajectory. Hence the joke nomination.
Yup, Jeff is going up. And he’s bringing his brother up with him for the ride.
Now we know why Jeff appointed a new CEO for Amazon… Just in case he doesn’t make it back.
As I said upthread, I was fairly certain he was going on that ride.[*] I figured his wife would go too, but, well, divorce…
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[*] New Shepard is going to be the world’s most expensive amusement park ride. OK, a ride in search of an amusement park.
What is with these super-rich white guys and outer space?
You guys have a job: it’s called Fix Your Companies!
Hey, Elon, you need to make better cars. They’re too expensive, there are quality control issues, oh, and idiots DWA (Driving While Asleep) are killing people.
And Jeff? Your workers are trying to make a living wage… by peeing in bottles and pooping in bags?
“Sorry, no time to fix things, gotta play astronaut!”
It’s because, finally, the geeks are taking over the world.
It was only a matter of time time and I for one welcome our bespectacled overlords.
The winning bid for this seat is $28M. They haven’t released the name of the winner yet. Also, a 4th person, in addition to the auction winner and the Bezos brothers, will be on the trip. They haven’t said who that person will be.
That username is a bit judgemental to start a thread like this.
Bezos may have a zillion dollars, but – short of buying Luxembourg – he’s really setting the bar pretty high for future family birthday gifts.
I have a friend from college who works for Blue Origin; I tried asking him if he’s got plans for July but he was mysteriously silent.
It’s because his Mother always liked brother best.
Latest word is that the fourth person is
Yes, Wally Funk is confirmed. The other passenger is Oliver Daemen, an 18-year old Dutch kid.
I wanted to know more about the New Shepard vehicle and its flight profile. There are, as always, wikipedia articles with some of the details to aid in the flight visualization, such as
- Engine: LOX + H2, burns for 110 s
- At MECO, the rocket is at 40 km altitude. It will coast all the way up to 100 km, about double the max. altitude of Branson’s recent flight.
- Total time of flight will be about 10 minutes.
- I wonder…what the peak g-loads will be during re-entry. For Mercury-Redstone 3, Astronaut Alan Shepard endured a peak of 11.6 g’s! I’m sure the designers of New Shepard worried about the suborbital g-loading during re-entry, and must have found a way to mitigate them. I just don’t know what that number is. Anyone?
While the uncrewed version of the rocket can do propulsive landing, similar to the Falcon 9, for this first-ever crewed flight, the crew capsule separates and uses a parachute to return gently to Earth, Soyuz-style, while the booster does the propulsive landing bit.
It would be interesting to see who will be the brave volunteer to crew the first ever propulsive landing of a rocket. We gotta do this if we ever want boots on Mars.