Jeff Bezos, the world's richest man, soared about 66.5 miles above the Texas desert aboard his company Blue Origin's New Shepard spacecraft on Tuesday and returned safely to Earth, a historic suborbital flight that begins a new era of private commercial space tourism.
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"Best day ever," Bezos said after the space capsule touched down, kicking up a cloud of dust on the desert floor.
The 57-year-old American billionaire was joined by his brother Mark, a private equity executive for a trip lasting 10 minutes and 10 seconds. The two brothers were accompanied by 18-year old Oliver Daemen, Blue Origin's first paying customer, and the youngest person to go to space. His father, who heads investment management firm Somerset Capital Partners, was on site to watch his son fly. Bezos also invited 82-year-old Wally Funk, who was one of 13 women of the so-called Mercury 13 group who trained to become NASA astronauts in the early 1960s but were passed over because of their gender.
After landing and exiting the space capsule, Bezos and the other crew members exchanged hugs and popped champagne.
The fully autonomous 60-foot-tall white spacecraft, with a blue feather design on its side, ignited its BE-3 engines for liftoff from Blue Origin's Launch Site One facility about 20 miles outside the rural town of Van Horn.
The flight came nine days after Briton Richard Branson was aboard his competing space tourism company Virgin Galactic's successful inaugural suborbital flight from New Mexico. The two flights give credibility and inject enthusiasm into the fledgling space tourism industry that the Swiss bank UBS estimates will be worth $3 billion annually in a decade.
"Well done," Branson wrote on Twitter, congratulating Bezos and his crewmates.
Bezos founded Blue Origin two decades ago. This was its first crewed space flight.
New Shepard hurtled at speeds reaching 2,233 miles per hour, exceeding the so-called Karman line – 62 miles – set by an international aeronautics body to define the boundary between Earth's atmosphere and space.
After the capsule separated from the booster, the crew unbuckled to experience weightlessness. The capsule returned to Earth under parachutes, using a retro-thrust system that expelled a "pillow of air" for a soft landing.
Branson got to space first, but Bezos flew higher - Virgin Galactic managed an altitude of 53 miles – in what experts called the world's first unpiloted space flight with an all-civilian crew.
The flight came on the anniversary of Americans Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin becoming the first humans to walk on the moon, on July 20, 1969. New Shepard is named for Alan Shepard, who in 1961 became the first American in space.
New Shepard is a rocket-and-capsule combo that cannot be piloted from inside the spacecraft. It is completely computer-flown and had none of Blue Origin's staff astronauts or trained personnel onboard. Virgin Galactic used a space plane with a pair of pilots onboard.
The reusable Blue Origin booster had previously flown twice to space.
The launch represented another step in the fiercely competitive race to establish a space tourism sector. Another billionaire tech mogul, Elon Musk, plans to send an all-civilian crew on a several-day orbital mission on his Crew Dragon capsule in September.
On Twitter, Musk wished Blue Origins crew "best of luck" before the launch.
Blue Origin aims for the first of two more passenger flights this year to happen in September or October.
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