Jeff Bezos, the billionaire creator of Amazon, said on Monday that he and his brother Mark will go in space for the first-time next month with their rocket business Blue Origin.
“I’ve wanted to travel to space since I was five years old. On July 20th, I will embark on that voyage with my brother,” Bezos, one of the world’s wealthiest people, wrote on Instagram.
Bezos, who is set to leave Amazon on July 5, will join the winner of an auction for a ticket on Blue Origin’s first space trip.
Bezos, fellow billionaire Elon Musk, and Richard Branson have all invested billions of dollars in their rocket companies, but Bezos will be the first of the three to journey into space on his own rocket.
The Blue Origin spacecraft, which will transport Bezos and others, has completed 15 test flights, none of which included passengers.
Last month, Blue Origin announced that it had received more than 5,200 bids from 136 nations in the first round of the auction, but did not reveal the highest amount.
According to Blue Origin’s website, the current top bid in the ongoing second round of auction was $2.8 million.
What is the flight Jeff Bezos is Taking to fulfil childhood dream of space travel
Its New Shepard rocket-and-capsule combination is designed to fly six passengers more than 62 miles (100 kilometres) above Earth into suborbital space, high enough to experience a few minutes of weightlessness and see the planet’s curvature before the high-pressure capsule returns to Earth under parachutes.
According to Blue Origin, the capsule has six view windows that are roughly three times as tall as those on a Boeing 747 aircraft and are the largest ever utilized in space.
Bezos’ rocket company plans to launch its first suborbital sightseeing mission on July 20, a turning point in a race to usher in a new age of private commercial space travel.
According to Reuters in 2018, the business planned to charge passengers at least $200,000 for the voyage, based on an analysis of competitor proposals from Branson’s Virgin Galactic Holdings and other factors, but its intentions may have changed.
When it comes to addressing risks associated with space travel, global insurers are still in the early phases. Life insurers either don’t ask about space tourism or don’t cover it.
“You’ll sign this release of liability, and assuming there’s no gross negligence or deliberate wrongdoing, if you don’t survive, there’s probably no financial recovery,” said Richard Parker of insurer AmTrust Financial’s Assure Space.
