Billionaire race: Jeff Bezos leads, goes to space next month

Amazon founder and outgoing CEO Jeff Bezos has announced that he will fly into space with his brother next month, leading rivals in the space race with billionaires Elon Musk and Richard Branson.

Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos inspects the New Shepard launch facility in West Texas. A spot on his upcoming flight is up for auction. Photo: EPA This will be the first manned flight conducted by Bezos’ space company, Blue Origin. The flight is scheduled to take place on July 20, the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon. Bezos and his brother Mark, a former advertising executive and volunteer firefighter, will join the flight with the winner of the ship’s airfare auction, with the lowest bid of $2.8 million. USD. In an Instagram post, billionaire Bezos said he had dreamed of traveling into space since he was 5 years old. “I will go on that journey with my brother. The best adventure, with my best friend,” declared the Amazon founder. With an estimated personal fortune of $186.2 billion, Jeff Bezos is one of several billionaire entrepreneurs driving a “new space race,” each pumping billions of dollars into private startups. Their aim is to develop low-cost, commercialized space travel. But while Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson is expected to make a suborbital flight later this year, and SpaceX’s Elon Musk has vowed to “die on Mars,” it’s Bezos who’s the one. Win the race to be the first of this hit trio of billionaires to reach the edge of space. Watch Blue Origin successfully launch and land a reusable New Shepard space rocket (Source: CNBC) Mr Musk has yet to comment on Bezos’ latest statement, while Branson congratulated his rival, saying their two companies are “opening up to space”. “Congratulations to Jeff Bezos and his brother Mark for announcing their plans to go into space. Jeff started Blue Origin in 2000, we started Virgin Galactic in 2004 and now both are opening up access to space – incredible!” Branson tweeted. personal. Musk and Bezos are said to have been head-to-head on several projects over the past decade. Elon Musk sees his tech giant as an “imitation” in some of Amazon’s business ventures, while Bezos mocks the SpaceX CEO’s plans to send people to Mars. Bezos’ company Blue Origin was founded in 2000, touting itself as a means of providing cheaper access to space through the use of reusable rockets – namely the New Shepard that flew 15 times. Jeff Bezos’ space tourism project with Blue Origin is competing with a similar program being developed by Space X, the rocket company founded and run by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, and the company. Virgin Galactic is backed by Richard Branson. In April 2017, Bezos revealed that he invests about $1 billion in Amazon stock in Blue Origin every year. Blue Origin’s spaceship system consists of a pressurized crew capsule mounted on top of a reusable New Shepard booster. During the first manned flight into space, the crew aboard the New Shepard will spend at least 10 minutes hovering in zero gravity inside the capsule. Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000. The upcoming space flight is the culmination of more than two decades of forays into space for Jeff Bezos, who announced plans to step down as Amazon’s CEO just now. 15 days before flight date. Instead, he will become Executive Chairman of the company he founded in his garage in 1994 – allowing him “time and energy” to focus on other business ventures. Blue Origin named its space rocket program New Shepard after astronaut Alan Shepard, the first American to fly into space exactly 60 years ago. The upcoming flight will mark a major milestone in the mission to take paying customers beyond space. However, for now, Elon Musk’s SpaceX seems to be leading in the space billionaire race with multiple launches of NASA equipment to the ISS and a partnership to send tourists to space by 2021. On February 6, 2018, SpaceX launched a rocket to orbit Mars, more than 220 million km from Earth, and NASA selected two astronauts to join the first manned Dragon mission performed by SpaceX. . Watch the video of SpaceX’s Starship rocket being launched and successfully landed for the first time on May 5, 2021 (Source: SpaceX): SpaceX has also begun sending a series of 60 satellites into space to help form its Starlink network. Mr. Musk hopes the program will build a network of interconnected satellites around the Earth, thereby providing free Internet to everyone around the world. Meanwhile, billionaire Richard Branson and Virgin Galactic are taking a different approach to conquering space. Virgin Galactic has repeatedly performed successful test flights of the Unity spacecraft. The first time took place in December 2018 and the last time took place on February 22 this year. More than 600 wealthy clients to date, including celebrities like Brad Pitt and Katy Perry, have booked $250,000 for one of Virgin’s spacewalks. Richard Branson introduces SpaceShipTwo, a spaceship with room for six passengers and two pilots. Photo: Reuters Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo can carry six passengers and two pilots. Each passenger has a seat with two large windows – one on the side and one above. Passengers will become “astronauts” when they reach the Karman line, the boundary of Earth’s atmosphere. The spacecraft will then make a sub-orbital journey with about six minutes of weightlessness. The whole flight took about 1.5 hours.