How do you track Jeff Bezos' flight in space?
The Blue Origin Company and Jeff Bezos launch the first manned flight of the New Shepard rocket on July 20 starting at 1:30 p.m. and live. Like his competitor Richard Branson with Virgin Galactic, the boss of the giant Amazon is also on the trip. But how to follow this new attempt at space tourism live? We tell you everything.
On July 20, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, will fly into space just nine days after the theft of Richard Branson, another billionaire (Virgin) who started a space tourism company. former CEO of Amazon precisely left his post on July 5 to better devote himself to his conquest of space.
He and the other three passengers will be the first to fly aboard the New Shepard spacecraft. After 15 automated tests, 14 of which were successful, the rocket from Blue Origin, a company of Jeff Bezos, was to propel them weightlessly 106 kilometers above the Earth in a flight lasting a total of 11 minutes.
Where to follow the event?
The world's richest man's rocket will lift off at 1:30 p.m. French time (6:30 a.m. Texas), weather permitting. Used to seeing everything big, the founder of Amazon obviously provided a few cameras to immortalize the experience.
The event will be broadcast live 1 hour 30 minutes before the launch on the Blueorigin.com website or via the company's YouTube channel. The live broadcast will retransmit the exterior images of this journey into the cosmos. The panoramic views from space and the images of the interior of the capsule, including the facial expressions of Jeff Bezos propelled at more than 3,000 km / h, or three times the speed of sound, will only be broadcast 'a posteriori.
The Amazon founder will however be able to be heard at a live press conference alongside his partners after the theft, reveals Blue Origin. Twitter followers will also be able to follow all of the events on the social network, via the @Blueorigin account.
The New Shepard will have on board Mark Bezos, the brother of Amazon boss, aviation pioneer Wally Funk, 82, and Dutchman Olivier Daemmen, 18 and Blue Origin’s first customer.
The latter two will become the oldest and oldest person to travel in space, respectively. Unavailable on July 20, the anonymous person who took his 28 million euro ticket up for auction will be leaving on an upcoming flight. The four space tourists will spend a few minutes 6 kilometers beyond the Karman Line, set at 100 km altitude, the limit between Earth's atmosphere and space, according to the International Aeronautical Federation. They will thus officially become astronauts after the flight.
#NewShepard is go for launch on July 20 for #NSFirstHumanFlight. This is the 16th flight and first with astronauts on board. Watch live at https://t.co/7Y4TherpLr. Coverage starts at 6:30 am CDT / 11:30 UTC. pic.twitter.com/hYv68UlCqm
— Blue Origin (@blueorigin) July 12, 2021
Space tourism objective
With this flight, Jeff Bezos confirms his ambitions in the space tourism race, while Richard Branson, the boss of Virgin, was ahead of him by a few days during a flight shared with five of his employees on July 11. Outpaced, however, the Blue Origin team goes higher than the 80 kilometers altitude reached by the Branson crew, which NASA considers the limit of outer space.
The main objective of Blue Origin is none other than the conquest of space. The billionaire wants to be able to create, one day, colonies floating in suborbital space and in which millions of people could live. Believing it is too late to save the Earth, and its resources, the billionaire sees the future in space. Thus, it has financed Blue Origin from its own funds since its creation in 2000. The company also participated in the financing, in the early 2010s, of the development of the space transport system for the crews of the International Space Station (ISS ).
A race against time from which Elon Musk is not excluded. SpaceX, the billionaire's company, is due to send civilians into space at the end of the year, using its Crew Dragon rocket. Elon Musk’s company plans to show passengers around the space station, thanks to a partnership with Axiom Space, an American astronautics company.
More New Shepard flights planned
Two other New Shepard flights are planned this year, before increasing launches from 2022, according to a spokesperson for Blue Origin. No tickets have actually been sold yet, unlike Virgin Galactic, which is also winning two seats by raffle in its rocket.
But Jeff Bezos is already thinking bigger for Blue Origin, which is currently developing New Glenn, an orbital rocket with a moon landing module, with a view to securing the contract for NASA's Artemis program, whose goal is to bring a crew to lunar soil by 2024.
