'Can't wait to get my Uber up there' - Blue Origin sees clear skies for inaugural space flight
Record ID:
1627710
'Can't wait to get my Uber up there' - Blue Origin sees clear skies for inaugural space flight
- Title: 'Can't wait to get my Uber up there' - Blue Origin sees clear skies for inaugural space flight
- Date: 20th July 2021
- Summary: NEW YORK, NEW YORK, UNITED STATES (JULY 20, 2021) (REUTERS) VARIOUS OF BLUE ORIGIN LAUNCH ON SCREEN IN TIMES SQUARE PEOPLE WATCHING LAUNCH (SOUNDBITE) (English) SPECTATOR, MIKE GALKIN, SAYING: "This is great. It's a wonderful achievement for space and human space travel. This is the next era. Can't wait to get my Uber up there." PEOPLE WATCHING LAUNCH (SOUNDBITE) (English) SPECTATOR, MIKE GALKIN, SAYING: "I'm scared of heights, so I give them all the credit in the world because I would not be able to handle that at all." PEOPLE WATCHING LAUNCH (SOUNDBITE) (English) SPECTATOR, RAJIV RAMACHANDRAN, SAYING: "It's a great moment to see something like this happen and I think it's just going to be awesome for all of us to get a chance to go into space in the future." PEOPLE WATCHING LAUNCH (SOUNDBITE) (English) SPECTATOR, SINDHYA GOVIND, SAYING: "It's one of our lifetime things that could happen for us, traveling so fast." (SOUNDBITE) (English) SPECTATOR, RAJIV RAMACHANDRAN, SAYING: "I think we joke with the kids that, probably, they'll be having dinner sometime in space very soon. At their age, it's going to be much more common." PEOPLE WATCHING LAUNCH (SOUNDBITE) (English) SPECTATOR, DAVIN SHIN, SAYING: "There's always regular people thinking about the billionaires going up but honestly, I think it's a celebration for the everyday man to be able to go up." PEOPLE WATCHING LAUNCH VARIOUS OF LAUNCH AND LANDING TOPS OF BUILDINGS IN TIMES SQUARE (MUTE) TIME-LAPSE OF LAUNCH AND LANDING
- Embargoed: 3rd August 2021 17:54
- Keywords: Blue Origin Jeff Bezos New Shepard flight space
- Location: NEW YORK, NEW YORK, UNITED STATES
- City: NEW YORK, NEW YORK, UNITED STATES
- Country: USA
- Topics: Science,Space Exploration,United States
- Reuters ID: LVA001EMN9ZRB
- Aspect Ratio: 16:9
- Story Text:On a giant screen in New York's Times Square, people watched Jeff Bezos, the world's richest man, soar about 66.5 miles (107 km) above the Texas desert aboard his company Blue Origin's New Shepard launch vehicle on Tuesday (July 20) and return safely to Earth, a historic suborbital flight that helps to inaugurate a new era of private commercial space tourism.
"It's a wonderful achievement for space and human space travel," Mike Galkin said. "This is the next era. Can't wait to get my Uber up there."
"There's always regular people thinking about the billionaires going up but honestly, I think it's a celebration for the everyday man to be able to go up," David Shin said.
The fully autonomous 60-foot-tall (18.3-meters-tall) gleaming white spacecraft, with a blue feather design on its side, ignited its BE-3 engines for a liftoff from Blue Origin's Launch Site One facility about 20 miles (32 km) outside the rural town of Van Horn. There were generally clear skies with a few patchy clouds on a cool morning for the launch.
The 57-year-old American billionaire, wearing a blue flight suit and donning a cowboy hat, was joined by three crewmates for a trip to the edge of space officially lasting 10 minutes and 10 seconds. After landing and exiting the space capsule, Bezos and the other crew members exchanged hugs.
Bezos, founder of ecommerce company Amazon.com Inc, and his brother Mark Bezos, a private equity executive, were joined by two others. Pioneering female aviator Wally Funk, 82, and recent high school graduate Oliver Daemen, 18, became the oldest and youngest people to reach space.
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.
Bezos founded Blue Origin two decades ago. This was its first crewed space flight.
New Shepard hurtled at speeds reaching 2,233 miles (3,595 km) per hour, exceeding the so-called Kármán line - 62 miles (100 km) - 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.
Bezos gave a thumbs-up sign inside the capsule after landing, stepped out to cheers, then exchanged high-fives with some of the roughly two dozen family members and company employees on hand.
Branson got to space first, but Bezos flew higher - Virgin Galactic managed an altitude of 53 miles (86 km) - 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.
Funk was one of the so-called Mercury 13 group of women who trained to become NASA astronauts in the early 1960s but was passed over because of her gender. Daemen, Blue Origin's first paying customer, is set to study physics and innovation management at college in the Netherlands. His father, who heads investment management firm Somerset Capital Partners, was on site to watch his son fly.
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 on board.
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.
Blue Origin aims for the first of two more passenger flights this year to happen in September or October.
(Production: Roselle Chen, Andrew Hofstetter, Eric M. Johnson) - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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