“Best day ever!” Bezos exclaimed soon after landing. Bezos, the world’s richest man, emerged from the capsule wearing a cowboy hat, and Funk exited the hatch with arms outstretched, celebrating her first trip to space 60 years after her first taste of astronaut life. The crew’s families and friends greeted the spaceship after landing. The 12.5-foot-wide (3.8-meter) crew capsule opened three main parachutes to slow down for landing on the desert floor at Bezos’s 80,000-acre West Texas test site nearly 11 minutes after it took off. The reusable rocket deployed drag brakes to slow its descent, then reignited its throttleable BE-3 engine and extended four landing legs for a pinpoint touchdown more than seven minutes after liftoff, arriving on a landing pad about two miles north of the launch site.ĭouble sonic booms rippled across the barren landscape as the rocket returned to Earth. ![]() ![]() Top speed on ascent was 2,233 mph (3,595 kilometers per hour), according to Blue Origin. The capsule reached a maximum altitude of 351,210 feet about four minutes after launch and began descending back to Earth. An in-cabin video released after the flight showed the passengers floating in the capsule, appearing elated with the experience as they played with candy and other items. The four-person crew had a chance to look out six windows, enjoying views of the Southwest United States under the deep black backdrop of space. Moments later, the rocket separated from the spacecraft carrying Bezos and his crewmates, allowing the passengers to briefly unstrap from their seats and float in the gumdrop-shaped capsule. The BE-3 engine shut down about 2 minutes, 20 seconds, into the flight, leaving the rocket and crew capsule to coast to the apogee, or high point, of its up-and-down trajectory. This was the 16th flight of a New Shepard rocket, the third launch of this reusable booster, and the first New Shepard to carry people. Here’s a replay of the launch of Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket at 8:11am EDT (9:11am EDT 1311 GMT). The single stage New Shepard booster climbed away from Blue Origin’s Launch Site One and rocketed into a sunny sky, exceeding the speed of sound in about one minute before quickly accelerating through the stratosphere. After a smooth countdown, the New Shepard booster lit its hydrogen-fueled BE-3 engine at 8:11 a.m. ![]() ![]() Wearing blue flight suits, the four-person crew rode in Rivian electric trucks from Blue Origin’s training center to the launch site, climbed the launch pad tower, and took their seats inside the spaceship sitting on top of a 60-foot-tall (19-meter) booster. Jeff Bezos, joined by his younger brother Mark, 82-year-old aviation pioneer Wally Funk, and 18-year Oliver Daemen from the Netherlands, boarded the New Shepard capsule just after sunrise at a privately-owned launch site north of Van Horn, Texas. Credit: Stephen Clark/Spaceflight NowĪmazon founder Jeff Bezos, his brother, a pioneering female pilot, and an 18-year-old Dutch student launched to the edge of space Tuesday on a 66-mile-high suborbital flight aboard his company’s New Shepard rocket, the latest achievement in a new era of billionaire-backed human spaceflight. Oliver Daemen, Jeff Bezos, Wally Funk, and Mark Bezos pose with the New Shepard booster that carried them to space Tuesday.
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