New York: Former world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos is not very nervous ahead of his venture into space Tuesday. Jeff Bezos will be the second billionaire after British businessman Richard Branson to venture into the space. Branson was the first to have made the pioneering suborbital flight from New Mexico. Jeff Bezos will fly with three others from a desert site in West Texas. He will be an 11-minute trip to the edge of space aboard his company Blue Origin’s ‘New Shepard’.
“People keep asking if I am nervous. I am not really nervous, I am excited. I am curious. I want to know what we are going to learn,” Bezos, founder of Amazon.com was quoted as saying by the ‘CBS This Morning’ programme Monday. “We have been training. This vehicle is ready. This crew is ready. This team is amazing. We just feel really good about it,” he added.
‘New Shepard’ is a 60-foot-tall and fully autonomous reusable rocket-and-capsule combo. The spacecraft has been named after ‘Mercury’ astronaut Alan Shepard, the first American to go to space. The time for the launch is approximately 8.00am (US time and around 18.00 hours IST). It will be launched from a site some 32km outside Van Horn, a rural town in Texas.
Bezos and his brother Mark Bezos will be accompanied by 82-year-old woman aviator Wally Funk and teenager Oliver Daemen, a recent high school graduate. Incidentally, Damien who is 18 years old is the company’s first customer who has paid an amount to be part of the trip. His father heads investment management firm ‘Somerset Capital Partners’.
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Bezos, who will fly off to space nine days after Branson was aboard his company Virgin Galactic’s rocket plane, said ‘this isn’t a competition’. He pointed out that Yuri Gagarin will be the person who will always be known as ‘first person’ in space. He said there was one person who was the first in space. “His name was Yuri Gagarin. And that happened a long time ago,” Bezos said on the NBC’s programme ‘Today’, referring to the Soviet cosmonaut who reached space in 1961.
“I think I’m going to be number 570 or something. That’s where we are going to be on this list. So this isn’t a competition. This is about building a road to space so that future generations can do incredible things in space,” added the American billionaire.
The mission represents the world’s first unpiloted flight to space with an all-civilian crew. This is because ‘Blue Origin’ will have none of its staff astronauts or trained personnel onboard.
Like Virgin Galactic’s flight, ‘New Shepard’ will not enter into orbit around Earth but will take the crew some 62 miles up (100km) before the capsule returns by parachute. Virgin Galactic’s flight reached 53 miles (86km) above Earth.
Nasa and the US Air Force define an astronaut as anyone who has flown higher than 50 miles (80km), as Branson achieved with his flight.
