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A lifelong dream and 20 years of work: How Blue Origin and Jeff Bezos arrived at their 1st astronaut launch
For Blue Origin, this coming moment has been more than two decades in the making.
Science & Tech
For Blue Origin, this coming moment has been more than two decades in the making.
The spaceflight company founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos is set to launch its first crewed mission on Tuesday (July 20), which will send the billionaire and three other people to suborbital space aboard a reusable rocket-capsule combo called New Shepard. Liftoff is set for 9 a.m. EDT (1300 GMT) from Blue Origin's Launch Site One near Van Horn, Texas.
The flight is a huge milestone for Blue Origin, which Bezos founded back in September 2000. It will mark the company's official entry into the suborbital space tourism business, because among New Shepard's four passengers is its first paying customer, an 18-year-old Dutch man named Oliver Daeman.
Tuesday will also be a very big day for Bezos himself, and not just for professional reasons. The world's richest person has repeatedly said that traveling to space is a nearly lifelong dream, one inspired when he watched the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969 at the age of five. And his own flight is a sort of tribute to that epic mission, for it's launching 52 years to the day that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took humanity's first-ever steps on a world beyond Earth.