By John Ikani
The wealthiest man on the planet Jeff Bezos, will ride his own rocket to outer space on Tuesday, a key moment for a fledgling industry seeking to make the final frontier accessible to elite tourists.
The American billionaire is due to fly from the desert site in West Texas on an 11-minute voyage to the edge of space nine days after British rival, Richard Branson was aboard his competing space tourism company Virgin Galactic’s successful inaugural suborbital flight.
Branson got to space first, but Bezos is due to fly higher – 62 miles (100 km) for Blue Origin compared to 53 miles (86 km) for Virgin Galactic.
Bezo’s will be the world’s first unpiloted space flight with an all-civilian crew.
Bezos, founder of ecommerce juggernaut Amazon.com Inc, and his brother and private equity executive Mark Bezos, will be joined in the flight by two others.
Pioneering female aviator, 82 year-old Wally Funk and recent high school graduate Oliver Daemen, 18, are set to become the oldest and youngest people to reach space.
“I am excited, but not anxious. We’ll see how I feel when I’m strapped into my seat,” Bezos said in an interview with Fox Business Network on Monday.
“We’re ready. The vehicle’s ready. This team is amazing. I feel very good about it. And I think my fellow crewmates feel good about it, too,” he added.
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 attend the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands to study physics and innovation management in September.
His father heads investment management firm, Somerset Capital Partners.
Barring technical or weather-related delays, New Shepard is due to blast off around 8 a.m. CDT (1300 GMT) from Blue Origin’s Launch Site One facility some 20 miles (32 km) outside the rural Texas town of Van Horn.
