Jeff Bezos will no longer be the richest person on Earth on 20 July because the Amazon founder will be blasting off into space on the first crewed flight of his New Shepard rocket ship. “You see the Earth from space, it changes you,” Jeff Bezos said in a video announcing his plan. Blue Origin, the spaceflight company Bezos founded in 2000, began testing its New Shepard vehicle in 2015. Despite being first to be formally founded, Blue Origin has long sat in the shadow of Elon Musk’s spaceflight company, SpaceX. The company has yet to achieve space flight by international standards, which sets the boundary at 100km, and despite initial plans to fly paying customers into space in 2009, it still hasn’t done so.

Source: The Guardian June 07, 2021 12:03 UTC