Now it’s Jeff Bezos’ turn to make history with a trip to space

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Just over a week after Richard Branson reached the edge of space, fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos is preparing for a similar high-stakes trip aboard his own rocket.

Bezos will attempt to fly into space on Tuesday, July 20, to launch aboard a rocket and capsule developed by Blue Origin, the Amazon founder’s private space company. This will be the first manned launch of a New Shepard missile from Blue Origin, and if successful, Bezos will go down in history to participate in the first unmanned suborbital flight.

Many other parameters can be set in the flight. Bezos will be joined by one passenger who will become the largest person to reach space and another the youngest.

Wally Funk, 82, a former test pilot who was one of the 13 Mercury women who underwent training in the 1960s to prove that women could meet NASA’s standards for teams of astronauts. At the age of 18, Dutch teenager Oliver Daemen could become the youngest astronaut. Bezos’ brother Mark concluded with four.

“Since I was five, I’ve dreamed of space travel,” Bezos wrote June 7 in an Instagram post announcing the flight. “On July 20, I will be taking this trip with my brother. The greatest adventure, with my best friend.”

A New Shepard missile launched from a location in the West Texas desert, southeast of El Paso. Since it is a sub-orbital flight, the capsule will not enter Earth orbit, but will instead reach the edge of space, at an altitude of about 65 miles, where passengers will experience several minutes of weightlessness.

The capsule will then descend under parachutes and land again in the Texas desert. The entire journey is expected to take approximately 10 minutes.

The launch is an important step for Blue Origin, which is banking on a futuristic market for high-priced amusement rides into space. Blue Origin hopes to begin operating flights paying passengers in the near future, and while the company hasn’t announced the price of single tickets, they are expected to cost several hundred thousand dollars.

Bezos’ attempt to reach space comes after Branson participated in a perilous test flight July 11 aboard a rocket-powered vehicle developed by his private space company, Virgin Galactic. But unlike Virgin Galactic’s space plane, the New Shepard’s rocket and capsule fly autonomously, without pilots on board.

The Blue Origin capsule is also designed to reach a higher altitude than Virgin Galactic. The edge of space is often defined by the so-called Karman Line, at 62 miles. As the New Shepard capsule flies over the Karman Line, the Virgin Galactic craft reached an altitude of about 53 miles during Branson’s flight.

This discrepancy has fueled competition between rival billionaires, with Blue Origin officials suggesting that Virgin Galactic’s flights don’t actually reach suborbital space.

Branson and his crew were eligible to receive commercial astronaut suites, however, because the Federal Aviation Administration and the U.S. Air Force recognize the limits of space to 50 miles.

Marco Caceres, a space industry analyst at Tel Group Corporation, said the Branson and Bezos flight could spur the space tourism industry, which has so far made slow progress over the past two decades. Ordinary citizens have paid for orbital flights to the International Space Station before, but all have been launched aboard Soyuz rockets and capsules operated by the Russian Space Agency.

“For all practical purposes, the space tourism industry does not really exist at the moment,” he said. “This officially marks the beginning.”

In addition to semi-orbital flights from Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin, Elon Musk’s company, SpaceX, plans orbital tour flights, beginning with its first mission to space with an all-civilian crew this year.

All of these tourism ventures could become a profitable segment of the commercial spaceflight industry, Caceres said, but it will likely take time.

“If it’s one trip every few months, it’s not enough to create an industry,” he said. “But if these companies start launching on a weekly basis, and you start seeing dozens or hundreds of these flights, then you can feel that this is a real thing.”

Branson, Bezos and Musk have all faced a backlash over their own aspirations in spaceflight, with some criticizing billionaire entrepreneurs for investing in petty self-serving ventures.

Such criticism is shortsighted, said Jim Cantrell, CEO of Phantom Space, an Arizona-based startup that aims to build and launch commercial satellites, and a former CEO of SpaceX.

“You can’t look at it in the context of this leap into space,” Cantrell said. “You have to look at it in the context of the bigger picture. This was all government-controlled, but we got to the point where people can do it. That’s the inspiring and hopeful part of all of this.”

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