VAN HORN, Texas — Near a small town in the West Texas desert, a quartet led by the world’s richest person is preparing to launch on a historic flight to the edge of space.
Blue Origin, the space company founded by Amazon executive chairman Jeff Bezos in 2000, has been testing prototypes of its New Shepard rocket and capsule for more than a decade.
After 15 successful test flights without people on board, Blue Origin is set to put its spacecraft to the ultimate test: Its first human spaceflight. On Tuesday, the company plans to send Bezos, his brother Mark, aerospace pioneer Wally Funk and Dutch teenager Oliver Daemen to the edge of space, to float in microgravity for a couple minutes, and return safely.
Bezos’ company is just one of many of a 21st-century generation of ventures in a new space race — one driven primarily by investors, rather than solely by superpower governments.
He’s also one of several billionaires pouring funds into companies, with Bezos going head-to-head with Elon Musk and Sir Richard Branson in the growing space industry. Like them, Bezos’ vision for his company stretches beyond launching wealthy passengers on spaceflight joyrides. Blue Origin’s mission is to create “a future where millions of people are living and working in space to benefit Earth,” and Bezos sees Tuesday’s flight as the next step toward achieving that goal.
Here is what you should know about the crew, the rocket launching them, what the experience is expected to be like, and the high profile but still small market for space tourists.
Four people will fly as Blue Origin’s first ever crew: Jeff Bezos, Mark Bezos, Wally Funk, and Oliver Daemen.
His Amazon reputation preceding him, the 57-year-old Bezos hardly needs introduction. But his connection to, and passion for, spaceflight does. The e-commerce mogul grew up inspired by the Apollo lunar landings, and was heavily influenced by the teachings of space visionary Gerard O’Neill while studying at Princeton.
Bezos has spent the majority of his time in the past two decades focused on Amazon, but along the way has steadily sold shares of the tech giant to fund Blue Origin’s development — to the tune of $1 billion a year or possibly more. Earlier this month, Bezos stepped down from his role as Amazon’s CEO, with many in the space industry expecting him to spend more time focusing on Blue Origin’s development. Beyond its New Shepard rocket, the company is developing the orbital New Glenn rocket, a stable of rocket engines, and a crewed lunar lander.
When checking out Blue Origin’s progress in the desert, Bezos is typically seen in a cowboy hat and boots — seemingly clashing with his more well known appearance as a sharp-dressed business magnate. But, while his outfits are more in line with the rural rancher scene, his space company’s gleaming rocketry is a sharp contrast. Blue Origin’s facilities can be seen from miles away on the highway that cuts through the valley, and the company’s clean white spacecraft jut out even more starkly.
Mark Bezos, age 53 and Jeff’s younger brother, was the second announced passenger for the first human flight. A volunteer firefighter residing in Scarsdale, New York, Mark Bezos said in a Blue Origin video that he “wasn’t even expecting” his brother “to be on the first flight,” let alone himself as well.
Wally Funk is a female aviation pioneer and, at 82, will become the oldest person to fly in space. She’s dreamed about flying to space longer than any of the other passengers have been alive — having been one of the so-called “Mercury 13,” a group of women who passed the same tests as NASA’s Mercury astronauts, only to never get a chance to fly to space.
Her aviation career is legendary — the first female civilian flight instructor at the U.S. Army’s Fort Sill, first female Federal Aviation Administration flight inspector, first female National Transportation Safety Board air safety investigator — and has logged more than 19,000 flight hours along the way.
The fourth and final member of the inaugural crew is 18-year-old Oliver Daemen. A last-minute addition to the group, Daemen takes the place of an anonymous person who bid $28 million for the last seat on this flight in a public auction last month. But, while the mystery bidder knew the spaceflight was scheduled for July 20 even before the auction began, Blue Origin says the person could not make the flight “due to scheduling conflicts” and is instead deferring to a later launch.
Daemen’s father Joes, the CEO of a private equity firm in the Netherlands, was a bidder in the public auction who Blue Origin said “had secured a seat on the second flight,” even though he hadn’t won the auction. But, when the mystery bidder backed out, the company “moved him up,” a Blue Origin spokesperson
