Everything went according to plan. Jeff Bezos, his brother Mark, 82-year-old American pilot Wally Funk, and 18-year-old Dutchman Oliver Daemen in a Blue Origin New Shepard rocket module ascended into space and returned to earth after ten minutes and eighteen seconds.
“Welcome back to Earth. Congratulations to everyone on board, “said seven minutes before half past three in the afternoon Central European Time from the control center, when a four-member crew landed in the Texas desert three kilometers from the launch site. Before that, she had experienced a state of weightlessness for about three minutes.
“It was the best day,” said Jeff Bezos, the richest man on the planet, shortly after the module landed. The world has four other astronauts without debate. The rocket with the module crossed the Kármán border, which is a generally established divide between the Earth’s atmosphere and space at a height of one hundred kilometers.
For Blue Origin, it was the first flight with a human crew. Today’s success thus fully launched commercial space flights. Two more should take place this year, and Shortly after launch, Blue Origin has confirmed that it is accepting more people willing to pay for a short trip into space.
Other space tourists now know exactly what awaits them. Ignition of the engines is followed by an ascent to a height of over 106 kilometers, which lasts four minutes. The rocket reaches a maximum speed of over 3595 kilometers per hour.
When the Kármán border is subsequently crossed, the launch vehicle is already separated from the module and returns to the earth’s surface, where it lands seven minutes after takeoff so that it can be used for further launches.
On the way back to the surface, the crew is already in the module, which is at the same time at an altitude of almost six thousand meters, and is waiting for the opening of the braking parachutes. They open eight and a half minutes after takeoff and the module lands at a speed of 26 kilometers per hour two minutes later, surrounded by the dust of whirling sand.
In another such flight, there will probably be a person who was supposed to be on board at the first takeoff. The owner of the ticket, for which he paid over 600 million crowns at the auction, but at the last moment twitched and postponed his participation.
Jeff Bezos is the world’s second billionaire to reach the universe in two weeks. Richard Branson and his Virgin Galactic team did something similar last Sunday.
But while Bezos flew into space straight from Earth, Branson used a special aircraft. A rocket detached from it at an altitude of 13.5 kilometers, which only then ascended with the crew to a height of 85 kilometers, ie below the Kármán line, which, especially on the part of Blue Origin, garnered a few teasing remarks.
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