“"Twenty-one years after he had founded the company in a Se..."”
Twenty-one years after he had founded the company in a Seattle warehouse, Jeff Bezos climbed aboard his own spacecraft. At 08:11 CDT on 20 July 2021—deliberately chosen to coincide with the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing—Blue Origin’s New Shepard vehicle roared off the Corn Ranch near Van Horn, Texas, on its sixteenth flight and its first with passengers. Inside the capsule were Bezos, his brother Mark, 82-year-old aviation pioneer Wally Funk, and 18-year-old Oliver Daemen, the first commercial astronaut to purchase a ticket on a privately funded, licensed vehicle. The hydrogen-fuelled BE-3 engine carried them past the Kármán line to 107 kilometres, granting three minutes of weightlessness and a view of Earth’s curvature through the largest windows yet flown in space. Funk became the oldest person to fly in space; Daemen the youngest. In a single ten-minute hop, Blue Origin demonstrated that suborbital space tourism was no longer a dream deferred—it was a business born.
The engineering principles pioneered here—Twenty-one years after he had founded the company in a Seattle warehouse, Jeff B—are still embedded in the aircraft you fly today.