Jeff Bezos Is Going To Space (For A Few Minutes)
Jeff Bezos has already chosen a hobby for his CEO's later life: space travel.
Just two weeks after stepping down as Amazon CEO, Bezos will board a rocket built by his space exploration company Blue Origin.
"If you look at Earth from space, it changes you. It changes your relationship with this planet, with humanity," Bezos said in a video posted to Instagram on Monday morning.
"Ever since I was five years old, I have dreamed of traveling to space."
Blue Origin's rocket is called New Shepard, & it's reusable—the idea being that reusing the rocket would reduce the cost of going to space and make it more accessible. The pressurized capsule has room for six passengers. There are no pilots.
This will be the 1st time a crew will be aboard the New Shepard in a rocket-attached capsule.
And it won't just be Bezos: He invited his brother Mark, too.
Want to join the Bezos brothers?
You can bid on a flight seat in an auction benefiting the foundation of Blue Origin, whose mission is to inspire future generations to pursue careers in STEM. The current high bid is $2.8 million.
The flight is scheduled for July 20 - the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969. Bezos stepped down from his CEO position on July 5, when he will hand over the reins to Andy Jesse, who currently leads Amazon's cloud computing division.
Bezos ended his Instagram post with Blue Origin's Latin motto, Gradatim Ferrociter — which the company translates as "Step by Step Brutally."
What does it mean, Bezos is going "into space"?
Technically, the Karman Line is the altitude at which space begins—about 62 miles above sea level.
But Bezos won't stay above that line for long. According to a graphic of the flight trajectory on Blue Origin's website, the flight is expected to last about 11 minutes, & only a small fraction of that time is above the Karman line.
New Shepard's journey is called suborbital flight, meaning the rocket is not powerful enough to enter Earth orbit.
A big leap for billionaires
Bezos is not the only one to spend some of his immense wealth on space exploration.
Elon Musk's SpaceX Crew Dragon now regularly carries astronauts to & from the International Space Station. & in May, a test flight by Virgin Galactic from Richard Branson reached an altitude of 55 miles, marking its third manned spaceflight.
But neither Musk nor Branson have traveled to space in their companies' planes yet.
In 2014, 2 pilots were aboard a Virgin Galactic test flight, which crashed in California's Mojave Desert, killing one of them. An investigation found that pilot error & design problems were responsible for the accident.
Four Virgin Galactic employees are expected to join the company's next test flight, & Branson is to board the flight, the BBC reported. Branson said last month that he is actively preparing his body for the spacecraft.
Virgin Galactic's design looks light-years apart from Blue Origin's New Shepard. Virgin's craft resembles an airplane, while New Shepard is an actual rocket.
But Bezos says Virgin Galactic's flights don't actually reach space.
"One of the issues Virgin Galactic will have to address is that they are not flying above the Karman line, not yet," Bezos told Space News in 2019. "I think one of those things they have to figure out is how to rise above the Karman Line."