Summary 

• Jeff Bezos, his brother Mark, former pilot Wally Funk and Dutch teen Oliver Daeman are all set to blast off to space on the New Shepard rocket of Blue Origin.
• The Blue Origin mission will be the first human flight, and the 16^th flight of New Shepherd
• The mission follows billionaire Richard Branson’s maiden Virgin Galactic voyage to space on 11 July.

Amazon founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos is all set to make history by going 100 kilometres above the surface of Earth on the Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket today (20 July), which also marks the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11’s moon landing in 1969.

The billionaire will take off from a desert site in West Texas nine days after his competitor billionaire Richard Branson created history with Virgin Galactic’s successful inaugural attempt, which he took off from New Mexico.

Bezos will go alongwith three others -- his brother Mark, former pilot Wally Funk and Dutch teen Oliver Daeman, who is the first paid enthusiast to go on the voyage. All of them are scheduled to cross the Karman line, which is considered as the edge of space, and is officially approved as the boundary space by the international authorities. The Karman line that separates the space from the atmosphere of the Earth, and for the first time a crewed flight of New Shepherd will fly above the Karman line. The Blue Origin mission will, therefore, be the first human flight, and the 16^th flight of New Shepherd, but the first one with astronauts on board. The previous 15 flights of New Shepherd were uncrewed, with the most recent one launched on 14 April 2021 as an astronaut rehearsal flight.

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The crew

Jeff Bezos, 57, who founded Blue Origin in the year 2000 in addition to Amazon, will fly off to space with three others -- his brother Mark Bezos, Wally Funk, and Oliver Daemen. Private equity executive Mark Bezos, 53, is Jeff’s younger brother, and is himself a millionaire. He is a former ad executive, a philanthropist, and a volunteer firefighter.

Wally Funk, 82, will become the oldest astronaut going out in space, beating John Glenn, 77, who flew out to space in the year 1998 on Discovery, the space shuttle of NlASA. Funk is a pioneering female aviator, who in her initial days in the US Space programme, was a part of the Mercury 13 project, under which women were trained for space travel just as per the same standards as their men counterparts. She was also the first ever female in the National Transportation Safety Board to serve as an air safety investigator.

Also read: Riding high: How space tourism sector is warming up

Dutch space enthusiast Oliver Daemen, 18, is all set to become the youngest ever going out in the space, beating Gherman Titov, 25, who flew out to the space in 1962 on the Soviet Union's Vostok 2 mission. Daemen is a space enthusiast and has a private pilot's licence. He is planning to study physics at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands. He replaced the winner of the auction conducted for the first seat on the New Shepherd and was the latest addition to the crew.  

The mission

The flight will be launched at 9 a.m. EDT (1300 GMT) from the launch Site One of Blue Origin, near Van Horn, Texas.  The flight will last for 11 minutes from the takeoff to landing. The New Shepherd rocket, which has already performed 15 uncrewed tests, has a height of approximately 18 meters, and is created with a purpose to make astronauts travel to suborbital space for a ‘weightless’ phase of around 3 minutes.  The rocket has been named after American astronaut Alan Shepherd was the first American to go to space in 1962, the second man to travel to space.

Without any pilot in the automated system, the rocket will autonomously return to the launch pad, and the members of the crew will land back on the planet underneath a parachute, inside their crew capsule. The capsule has a capacity of holding a maximum of six people, and has huge windows for letting the astronauts view the Earth from space.

The crew in the flight will be facing high risks as they would be subjected to G-loads or multiple force of gravity, predominantly in the course of launching and landing. At the top of the parabolic flight, the crew will also experience ‘weightlessness’ or microgravity for a couple of minutes. According to the terms and conditions document of Blue Origin, the crew is required to climb the launch tower of the spacecraft within 90 seconds, and not have any fear of heights. After climbing, the crew members will have to sit in a reclined seat for about 40-90 minutes prior to the launch of the flight and unstrap themselves within 15 seconds in case of any unforeseen circumstances.

Launch Site One, from where the flight will take off, is a remote and isolated area in the West Texas desert, and is approximately 25 miles away from the town of Van Horn. The area is mostly covered with desert scrub, which will offer a spectacular view from the top of the New Shepard launch area prior to the launch.

Blue Origin eventually intends to launch flights with a combination of astronauts and experiments, by allowing the paying companies to conduct tests in various fields such as biology or physics for a few minutes using microgravity.

Competition

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Blue Origin’s mission will follow the recently successful Virgin Galactic voyage, which was carried out on 11 July with its founder Richard Branson and a crew of Virgin Galactic employees on board. Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin have been engaged in a battle for gaining customers, warming up the space tourism sector. Although Branson refused that the companies were in competition, Blue Origin has recently released an infographic, which provides the customers with information about the benefits of buying a seat on the New Shepard over the VSS Unity spaceplane of Virgin Galactic.