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Jeffrey bezos space crew12/19/2023 The last seat went to Bezos' "best friend" and lookalike brother, Mark, a fellow tech boffin who has been by his side as he worked to make his childhood dream come true. Teenager Oliver Daemen, meanwhile, is the youngest at just 18, after his dad secured the winning ticket in an auction for the spare seat. The three passengers who board the New Shepard rocket designed by his company, Blue Origin, span across the generations and have been described as the most inexperienced crew set to orbit the Earth.Īt the age of 82, Wally Funk is now the oldest person to travel into space - decades after she was turned down as an astronaut by Nasa due to her gender. It’ll probably be plenty of time to ensure that the price tag of future trips appeals to those with the dough.As Jeff Bezos becomes the richest man ever sent into space, he's done so with some rather unusual guests. The Bezos gang’s parabolic voyage will carry them past the Kármán line-or 62 miles up, the US Department of Defense's round number that marks the boundary of space (the Federal Aviation Administration uses a more lenient 50 miles, which is where Branson flew last week)-and keep them up there just long enough to tickle the abyss. Bezos will try for second place, though Blue Origin has been keen to point out that the boundary of what constitutes space is a little contentious. Branson claimed victory last week, with a bombastic mission in his Virgin Galactic shuttle. The billionaires had locked themselves in a dude-bro cold war, each eager to make history as the very first head of a space tourism brand to hurl himself into the thermosphere. This launch is a big deal for Bezos too, obviously. It’s particularly neat for the 82-year-old passenger and ex-pilot Wally Funk, who had previously been denied her lifelong dream of traveling to space. Musk’s SpaceX has been flinging people into space for a while now, though none have been civilians yet.) Thanks to a last-minute booking change, the launch also now has the distinction of carrying both the youngest and the oldest person to ever go to space. (If you’re keeping score, Virgin has completed one other crewed flight. There have only been a handful of crewed commercial space launches, and this is Blue Origin’s first. Launching a rocket is dangerous, and things can go awry.) You can watch right here: (As with all liftoffs, that timing depends on weather, the whims of random animals, or any number of technical snafus. The actual launch is aiming for 9:00 am ET, but expect delays. The broadcast starts at 7:30 am Eastern time on July 20. (WIRED’s own Steven Levy will be reporting live from the launch site, so keep an eye out for his dispatches.) Today, Blue Origin will launch a crew including the former Amazon CEO, his slightly less high-profile brother, a trailblazing octogenarian pilot, and a young Dutch physics student up to the outer edges of the planet. You go to space! Or at least you do if you’re Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos. Do you use it to end world hunger? Do you take actually meaningful steps to mitigate the climate crisis? Ha ha, no. Just an unstoppable amount of dollars-the ability to buy anything and destabilize everything.
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