Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin launch into space: When and how to watch

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Here’s what you need to know:

Another week, another billionaire with a rocket company goes into space.

Last week, Richard Branson won his wings as an astronaut aboard Virgin Galactic, a company he founded 14 years ago, to more than 50 miles above New Mexico skies.

On Tuesday, Jeff Bezos, the richest human in the universe, will be lining up in a capsule built by his rocket company, Blue Origin, and blasting upward, more than 62 miles over West Texas.

Blue Origin aims to take off the rocket at 9 a.m. ET on Tuesday, July 20. The company will begin covering the launch at 7:30 a.m. on its YouTube channel. The date coincides with the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.

On Monday evening, the company said in a Twitter message that Bezos and his fellow passengers had completed their training and were ready to take off.

The New Shepard spacecraft, the Blue Origin spacecraft, is named after Alan Shepard, the first American in space. It consists of a booster and a capsule on top, where the passengers will be.

Unlike Virgin Galactic’s space plane, the New Shepard is more of a conventional rocket, flying vertically. Once the booster has used up the propellant – liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen – the capsule separates from the booster.

Both pieces continue to slope upward, above the 62-mile boundary often considered the beginning of outer space. During this part of the route, passengers will detach from the capsule and float around the capsule, witness about four minutes of free fall and see views of the earth and the blackness of space from the large capsule windows.

The booster lands first and vertically, similar to that of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The capsule lands minutes after the booster, descends under a canopy and is softened by a jet of air at the last second. The entire journey should take about 10 minutes.

New Shepard’s landing test took place in October 2020.Credit … Blue Origin

The Blue Origin New Shepard launched 15 times – all without anyone on board – and the capsule landed safely each time. (On the first launch, the booster vehicle crashed; on 14 subsequent launches, the vehicle landed intact.)

During one flight in 2016, Blue Origin conducted an onboard test of the missile’s escape system in which the thrusters moved the capsule away from the malfunctioning booster.

A solid-propellant rocket was fired to the bottom of the crew capsule for 1.8 seconds, and 70,000 pounds of force was expended to quickly separate the capsule and steer it away by the booster. Its parachutes spread, and the capsule quietly landed.

Not only did the capsule survive, but the booster was able to correct itself, continue into space, then fire up its engine again, and land a few miles north of the launch pad in West Texas, slightly charred but intact.

However, the federal government does not enforce passenger safety regulations on a spacecraft like the New Shepherd. Unlike commercial passenger aircraft, the missile has not been certified by the Federal Aviation Administration. In fact, law prohibits the FAA from issuing any such requirements until 2023.

The rationale is that space startups like Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic need a “learning period” to try out designs and procedures and that too much regulation, too soon, would stifle innovation that would lead to better, more efficient designs.

Passengers must sign forms acknowledging “informed consent” for the risks, similar to what they would sign if you went skydiving or bungee jumping.

What the FAA regulates is to ensure the safety of people not on board – that is, if something goes wrong, the risk to the “non-interfering public” on the ground is minimal.

Mr. Bezos brings his younger brother with him. Mark Bezos, 50, lived a much more private life. He is the co-founder and general partner of HighPost Capital, a private equity firm. Mark Bezos previously worked as head of communications for Robin Hood, a charity that helps fight poverty in New York City.

Blue Origin auctioned one of the seats, with proceeds going to Club for the Future, the space-focused charity founded by Mr. Bezos. The winning bidder paid $28 million—and we still don’t know who it was.

Oliver Damon May 2021 Credit Card… The Damon Family

Last week, the company announced that the auction winner decided to wait until a later flight “due to scheduling conflicts.”

Instead, he was shocked by Oliver Daemon, an 18-year-old Dutch student who was one of the auction contestants, who bought a ticket on New Shepherd’s second ride.

The fourth passenger is Mary Wallace Funk – gone by Wally – a pilot who in the 1960s was among a group of women who passed the same stringent criteria that NASA used to select astronauts.

Wally Funk, at 82, will be the oldest person to have ever gone into space. But that’s not what makes it so special.

In 1961, three years before Jeff Bezos was born, Ms. Funk and 12 other women were tested as part of the Woman in Space program. The tests were designed by Dr. William Lovelace for Mercury astronauts. He wanted the women to undergo the same tests to see if they were good candidates for the space.

Across the board, women who passed that initial round of testing fared as well or better than their male counterparts, and among that group, Ms. Funk excelled.

When you hear about these women today, they’re often called the Mercury 13, but they call themselves FLATs: First Lady Astronaut Intern.

None of these women have gone to space. The US government shut down the program while the Cold War space race was heating up. Ms Funk said that when she learned of the program’s cancellation, she was not discouraged.

I was young and happy. I thought it was coming, she said in Stephanie Nolin’s Promise of the Moon. “If not today, then in two months.”

Over the years, she applied four times to become an astronaut and was rejected because she had never earned an engineering degree. By contrast, when astronaut John Glenn was selected for the Mercury program, he also did not have an engineering degree.

Wally Funk, right, will become the oldest person to fly into space, credit…Marc Ralston/AFP – Getty Images

Ms. Funk has spent the past 60 years trying to find another way into space.

“I grew up that when things don’t go well, you go to your swing,” she said.

Cady Coleman, a NASA astronaut who served on the space shuttle and space station, sees the invitation as a message to Ms. Funk and the many unknown women in space and aviation.

“Wally—you matter. And what you did matters. And I honor you,” Dr. Coleman believes Mr. Bezos is saying. “When Wally flies, we all fly with her,” she adds.

But for many women and non-binary people involved in space and astronomy, the moment is more subtle.

“These individual stories and triumphs matter, but it’s not fair,” said Lucian Wukovich, an astronomer at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago.

As a child of the Apollo era, Jeff Bezos grew up fascinated by space. “Space is something I’ve loved since I was five,” he said in 2014. “I watched Neil Armstrong step on the moon, and I think it affected me.”

But this passion took a long back seat in his early business ventures. Mr. Bezos, now 57, first worked on Wall Street and then started Amazon in 1994. Six years later he founded Blue Origin, the company behind the spaceship he will fly on Tuesday. But building Amazon — his “day job,” as he once called it — took up the vast majority of his time, turning it from an online bookseller into one of the most powerful and feared retail businesses ever.

In recent years, he’s begun to back off a bit from Amazon, handing more and more day-to-day responsibilities to MPs. He usually spends a day a week – usually Wednesdays – to focus on Blue Origin, and in 2017 he announced that he would sell $1 billion in Amazon stock annually to fund the space project.

Mr. Bezos speaks during the Third Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colorado, in 2017. Credit … Nick Cote for The New York Times

Amazon’s success continued to drive Bezos’ fortune to the top, and in 2018, he surpassed Bill Gates to become the world’s richest person. Booking flights to space has risen to the top of his spending list.

“The only way I can use that much money is to turn my Amazon earnings into space flights,” he said, coining his investment as a form of philanthropy, after he came under criticism for not doing more to share his fortune. “The solar system can easily support a trillion people,” he said. “If we had a trillion human beings, we would have a thousand Einsteins and a thousand Mozarts and unlimited, for all practical purposes, resources and solar energy.”

He said, “This is the world I want my great-grandchildren to live in.”

He briefly reintroduced Amazon’s daily operations at the start of the coronavirus pandemic. But in February he announced plans to step down as Amazon CEO. Andy Gacy, one of his senior vice presidents, took office early this month.

Mr. Bezos said he wants to devote more focus to Blue Origin and his other projects.

“I’ve never had more energy before, and it’s not about retirement,” he told Amazon employees. “I’m very excited about the impact that I think these organizations can have.”

Now, two weeks after he officially stepped down, he’s headed into space.

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