Jeff Bezos is flying to space🚀
Here's everything you need to know ⏬
Hi 👋🏻, Welcome to
Rise and Shine☀ - Sunday Special
Every Sunday, an email will arrive in your inbox detailing a specific topic to help you understand it better.
Sign up below for free. 👇🏻
When is Jeff Bezos ‘ flight, and how is it different?
The world's richest man, Jeff Bezos, is preparing for an 11-minute 2,300-mph rocket ride to the edge of space, capping up a month of rocket news and a little drama among the world's wealthiest people who are devoting substantial chunks of their fortune to rocket research. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos launched his rocket company, Blue Origin, with a vision of millions of people living and working in space.
Blue Origin's New Shepard is a compact, suborbital rocket that takes off vertically from a launchpad, providing a shorter but faster ride than Virgin Galactic's aerial-launched space aircraft, SpaceShipTwo. Unlike SpaceShipTwo, New Shepard is a more traditional rocket, launched upward before the capsule detaches from a booster rocket. With no people on board, New Shepard has completed 15 automated test flights.
What will happen?
New Shepard also rises above the 62-mile-high Karman line. New Shepard's suborbital fights hit about three times the speed of sound — roughly 2,300 miles per hour — and fly directly upward until the rocket expends most of its fuel. The New Shepard capsule then deploys a large plume of parachutes to slow its descent to less than 20 miles per hour before it hits the ground, and Bezos and his fellow passengers will be further cushioned by shock-absorbent seats.
The Bezos brothers and their fellow passengers will travel up and down in less than 11 minutes, which is less than the time it takes most people to travel to work.
Who’s going?
Although the New Shepard capsule can hold up to six passengers, Bezos will only be traveling with three individuals on this first trip. Mark Bezos, his brother; Wally Funk, an 82-year-old pilot and one of the "Mercury 13" women; and Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old recent high school graduate.
How’s this different from what SpaceX and Virgin Galactic do?
Elon Musk's SpaceX has been making headlines and setting records with their rocket technology for years — and it's nothing like what Blue Origin will debut on Tuesday. SpaceX manufactures orbital rockets. Orbital rockets must generate enough thrust to reach at least 17,000 miles per hour or what’s known as orbital velocity. That's how SpaceX put satellites into orbit or carry astronauts to and from the International Space Station.
Suborbital flights, however, don't need to travel nearly as fast. They simply need to reach an altitude above the 50 miles mark — which the US government considers to mark the edge of outer space — or the 62-mile mark, which is internationally considered the demarcating line.
What New Shepard will do on Tuesday will be more akin to what Richard Branson, the other space billionaire, intends to do with his Virgin Galactic company.
Virgin Galactic has also announced plans to launch wealthy visitors into suborbital space, though it will do so using a very different vehicle. Virgin Galactic has constructed a piloted space plane that takes off from a runway (much like an airline) tethered to a large winged mothership, rather than an autonomous rocket that takes off vertically.
How risky is this?
Space travel is, historically, fraught with danger. Though the risks are not necessarily astronomical for Bezos' jaunt to suborbital space, as his space company Blue Origin has spent the better part of the last decade running New Shepard through a series of successful test flights.
Even so, any time a human straps oneself into a rocket, there are risks — and Bezos appears to have calculated that they are worth it to him.
"Ever since I was five years old, I've dreamed of traveling to space," Bezos wrote in his June announcement on Instagram.
The launch of New Shepard's first crewed flight will be broadcast beginning at 7:30 a.m. EDT (05:00 p.m. IST) on July 20 on BlueOrigin.com. Liftoff is scheduled for 9 a.m. EDT (06:00 p.m. IST), but that will depend on the weather forecast and other technical factors.
Hit 💜, if you liked Rise and Shine☀-Sunday Special.