Bulletins

Jeff Bezos has taken off for space

Jeff Bezos
Jeff Bezos wants you to fly to space.
Photo: Mandel Ngan/Getty Images

Jeff Bezos launched into space this morning on his New Shepard rocket, alongside his brother, 82-year-old Wally Funk and 18-year-old Oliver Daemen. This is the first human spaceflight for the rocket and for all four passengers.

The flight can be watched on the livestream on the Blue Origin website. The trip from Blue Origin's West Texas facility to the Kármán line (the widely-understood boundary into outer space) and back should last about 12 minutes. The passengers will be able to float in the capsule for about three or four minutes on their way up to the Kármán line.

Bezos's flight comes two weeks after billionaire Richard Branson's first flight on his Virgin Galactic rocket. Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin are now both selling tickets to other space tourists who might want to follow the two billionaires in the coming months; Blue Origin is planning two more flights in 2021.

Correction: This story was updated to correct the spellings of Oliver Daemen's last name and the name of the New Shepard rocket. This story was updated July 20, 2021.

Anna Kramer

Anna Kramer is a reporter at Protocol (Twitter: @ anna_c_kramer, email: akramer@protocol.com), where she writes about labor and workplace issues. Prior to joining the team, she covered tech and small business for the San Francisco Chronicle and privacy for Bloomberg Law. She is a recent graduate of Brown University, where she studied International Relations and Arabic and wrote her senior thesis about surveillance tools and technological development in the Middle East.

jeff bezosspace travelspace tourism
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