All right with weather, technology and health, Jeff Bezos will be next month Climb into a capsule on one of his Blue Origin rockets and get shot into space. His suborbital journey, expected to be just 10 minutes, will briefly take him across the Karman Line, which is 62 miles above sea level and marks the Earth’s outer atmosphere.
The vastly different reactions to his announcement this week can be summed up in two questions: Is he crazy? Or: can I go too? (Space romantic that I am, count me to the second camp).
For skeptics, the 57-year-old Amazon founder’s idea for such a high-profile space trip is the ultimate vanity project that also harms the environment. Studies have shown that rocket launches are responsible for Ozone depletion in the stratosphere.
Two weeks after resigning as Amazon boss on July 5, the richest man in the world becomes one of the first three crew members on board the New Shepard capsule launched by the space company he founded. He has also invited his brother Mark, a private equity investor and volunteer firefighter, who identified themselves in a joint appearance than “the one with the smaller bank account on your left”.
A successful trip would undoubtedly give Bezos the right to brag among the entrepreneurs who want to develop space tourism, most notably Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX and Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin Galactic. A trip into space could soon be considered an indispensable entry on a billionaire’s bucket list. Kim Stanley Robinson, the science fiction writer, has memorably described space tourism as “Bungee jumping” for the ultra-rich.
It is difficult to disagree with many of these criticisms. This story is not so much about the right things as it is about the rich things. Unlike the astronauts who preceded them, was the New Shepard crew will only train for three days. You don’t need any flying skills as the trip is completely automated. Third place goes to the winner of an ongoing charity auction that has already reached $ 3.5 million.
Nevertheless, one can admire Bezos’ extraordinary spirit of adventure: a man who seems to have everything and is ready to risk everything. Although Blue Origin successfully tested the unmanned capsule 15 times, all space missions are dangerous.
Sitting on a flammable fuel rocket that is hurtling through the atmosphere at tremendous speed is an inherently risky business. Of more than 550 people who have traveled into space, 18 died a death rate of about 3 percent during these missions. It is telling that the paying passenger, or more likely his surviving relatives, cannot sue Blue Origin if something goes wrong.
Bezos’ flight also highlights the amazing ingenuity and courage of the original space travelers. This April marked the 60th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s historic flight, which orbited the earth, lasted 108 minutes and covered 46,000 miles. As Stephen Walker explains in his captivating book on the early space race Beyond, one of the reasons Gagarin knocked Alan Shepard into space by 23 days was because the Soviets were more risk tolerant.
The Amazon founder, who named his capsule in honor of Shepard, calculates the risk very differently than during the Cold War and operates a so-called “Regret Minimization Framework”. Why shouldn’t he want to go into space if he had the chance? When announcing the launch in an Instagram video, Bezos enthused: “I’ve dreamed of going into space since I was five years old. . . It’s a big deal for me. “
But in a very bezosian way, he’s also obsessed with building the infrastructure and transporting packages required for future space stations. So far, Blue Origin has been seen as a follower in the race with Musk’s more innovative SpaceX. But you can rest assured that Bezos is increasingly focusing his wasteful resources and laser-sharp attention on his space companies.
When he revealed his Blue moon moon landing In 2019, Bezos said that Amazon’s success was only possible because of the logistics and internet infrastructure built by previous generations. Bezos, in turn, wanted to build the infrastructure for future space entrepreneurs. “It is the job of this generation to build this path into space so that future generations can let their creativity run free,” he said.
Bezos’ journey may be a small, rampant flight for a human, but it can accelerate a larger journey for humanity.
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