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.

Soviet secret space rocket NPO Mashinostroyenia is a Russian state space development company, which grew out of a Soviet entity, known simply as OKB-52, responsible for the development of the Almaz space station, among other things. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu’s visit to NPO Mashinostroyenia in early 2021 offers the best and most complete look at the Shchit-1 system to date. The Almaz program was a covert effort to develop military space stations, primarily equipped to carry out intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions, hidden within the Saylut civilian space station project. The Almaz effort dates back to the 1960s, only to be officially declassified in the early 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union planned to “weapon” the Almaz stations from the start, fearing attacks with US anti-satellite weapons – including small but maneuverable “killer satellites”. tall and more traditional interceptors. An example of the Shchit-1 system actually sent into space with the Almaz OPS-2 satellite. The Soviet Union also conducted a remote live-fire test with the system on January 24, 1975, the last day of the station in orbit. The results of the test remained confidential and the next Almaz space station, OPS-3, was launched without any weapons installed. OPS-4, which has never been to space, is believed to carry the Shchit-2 system. However, there is no indication that Shchit-2, although its general existence was previously known, has ever entered space and details about the system are still very limited. As for the “weapon” itself, Leonard Smirichevsky, the current head of NPO Mashinostroyenia, described it to a reporter for TV Zvezda as having four main components. The base of the system was a solid-fuel rocket engine, which was then attached to a rotary stabilization system consisting of a rotating wheel with blade-shaped radiators. There’s a hybrid warhead-propulsion section followed by a nozzle-like radar seeker at the front. By far, the engine – warhead part is the most interesting part. Outwardly, it appears to be a circular array of small, grenade-like charges, which one imagines would create a shrapnel cloud especially dangerous to other objects in the vacuum of space. . However, these projectiles are really solid and are designed to act as interceptors, destroying anything they hit through sheer force of impact. No one knows what happened to Shchit-2 after the Almaz program ended in 1978. It is also unclear why the Russians decided to consider the system at this time. The incident comes amid new discussions about anti-satellite weapons in orbit, including interceptors and guided-energy weapons, as well as killer satellites, and the development of systems this system, both in Russia and the United States, among other countries. Space weapon Shchit-2 on display at NPO Mashinostroyenia. Almaz . military space station The Almaz military space stations, which first began operating in the early 1960s, were intended to be armed from the outset. Almaz stations are expected to be versatile military platforms in space. This plan is for the first types configured primarily for a wide range of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions with cameras and many other sensor systems. The delay in the development of the sensor package affected the entire program. In 1971, the Soviet Union launched a civilian space station – Salyut – incorporating some of the design work developed under the Almaz program, along with components from the Soyuz spacecraft. The Salyut program eventually provided cover for the Almaz space station. Of the seven Salyut space stations launched between 1971 and 1991, three are actually of the military type. The first Almaz station, publicly known as Salyut-2 and also known as OPS-1, entered service in 1973. However, an accident on board shortly after launch forced the Soviet Union to abandon it. it before a real crew could be dispatched to join. OPS-2, also known as Salyut-3, followed in 1974. The station was successfully put into orbit on June 25, 1974. The crew stayed there for 15 days to test the Earth-viewing camera with the onboard Agat-1 telescope, which was said to be able to produce high-resolution images of the ground. The second crew failed to reach the station in late 1974 after their Soyuz spacecraft crashed. The third mission to OPS-2 was later aborted and it operated in unmanned mode until leaving orbit on January 24, 1975. In September 1974, personnel on the ground remotely recovered a film “pod” from the Agat-1 camera, then returned to Earth and recovered. The next Almaz space stations, called OPS-3 and Salyut-5, have no weapons on board, at least as far as we know. Plans for an OPS-4 station include a new Shchit-2 self-defense system, reportedly designed to fire interceptor missiles, but no images of that weapon have been made public. The Soviet Union also developed specialized self-defense guns for cosmonauts, such as the TP-82, but they were intended for use on Earth, not in space.

Illustration. TASS. Igor Pshenichnikov, responsible for the Amur-LNG project, said Russian experts are developing a reusable methane rocket engine for the Amur boosters that can redirect carriers. off the launch pad in the event of take-off malfunction. “We are planning to deploy a hot backup and guidance system in the Amur boosters,” he said. If one of the motors fails, it will be turned off while the operation of the other thrusters will be accelerated. The lead expert explained: “In this situation, the quest continuation option would be considered.” If damage occurs during takeoff or near the ground, the missile will not be able to launch due to its large mass. That is why the missile is diverted to a safe distance so as not to damage the launcher. Russian State Space Corporation Roscosmos and Progressive Space Missile Center signed a contract in October 2020 for the design of a space missile system concept with reusable methane-fueled rockets. The first Russian Amur application. The missile will be launched from Vostochny aerospace in the Russian Far East at a stage of reuse. In February, Dmitry Baranov – Director of the Advanced Space Rocket Center (a division of Roscosmos) said work on the conceptual design of the methane Amur fuel missile will be completed by the third quarter of 2021. . Amur is a commercial missile carrier. With the reuse phase, it will be able to put the payload of up to 10.5 tons into orbit as low as Earth, compared with the 8.5 tons carried by the Soyuz-2 rocket.