Photo: NASTAR
How to go to space

Good morning! This Friday, how to train to go to space, Google is reorganizing its health team, ditch your cubicle and pitch a tent instead, and helicopter startup Blade had a fake spokesperson foryears.
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Jeff Bezos, his brother and a mystery companion are heading to space next month on Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket, leveling up the bucket list for billionaires club activities. (The mystery seat sold for $28 million at auction, by the way).
It will be the first manned flight for the New Shepard rocket, which seems like quite the risk to take, but apparently the 7,000-plus bidders eager for an adventure alongside Bezos did not agree with me.
Bezos's isn't the only upcoming "tourist" flight for this year. SpaceX will be launching a far larger mission to the International Space Station, called the "Inspiration4," in September. For the first time for any space mission, the rocket will be crewed entirely by amateurs/space tourists/non-astronauts.
But you can't just go to space without training. I sat down with Glenn King, the COO of the National Aerospace Training and Research Center, to find out what it takes. He helps hundreds of potential space tourists — including the Inspiration4 crew — learn what it's like to experience the G-forces involved in space travel, using an FAA-approved human centrifuge.
Historically, few were eligible for space travel, though that's changing. NASTAR also provides medical monitoring technology in an effort to dramatically widen the range of people who are eligible for space flight. While NASA and other government astronaut programs usually hire only the most physically and emotionally healthy people and then train them for years, commercial space tourism companies want almost anyone to be able to fly. King told me that this can absolutely happen.
But the hardest part will be getting a ticket to board one of these space flights, not the NASTAR training. SpaceX, Virgin Atlantic, Blue Origin and satellite-hotel company Axiom (which is building a luxury orbital hotel with permission to dock at the ISS) are all planning to get hundreds of tourists into space.
Of course, as often goes with luxuries that only the richest among us can afford, space travel has some haters. In fact, there's a Change.org petition circulating this week with more than 13,700 signatures asking the government to prevent Jeff Bezos from reentering the Earth's atmosphere. Ouch.
In 2018, Amazon increased their starting wage to at least $15 an hour for all employees across the U.S. The positive impact on employee morale and retention—and the surge in job applicants—was immediate.
The Titanium coin crashed all the way to zero in the span of about 24 hours, leading Mark Cuban to call for more regulation:
On Protocol: Startups should start thinking about hiring dedicated DEI executives while they're still small, GV's Candice Morgan said:
Mark Zuckerberg is bullish on exercise as a killer app for VR:
Google is downsizing its health team, Business Insider reported, and moving most of its work to the Fitbit side of the organization.
Katie Harbath is joining the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab as a nonresident fellow. She recently stepped down as Facebook's longtime public policy director.
Laura Jones is Instacart's new VP of brand and marketing, joining from Uber.
Canoo is building a manufacturing facility in Tulsa. The company plans to bring 2,000 jobs to the area, and the plant is scheduled to open in 2023.
As we all head back to work, we're re-thinking everything about the workday. But what about the workweek? There has long been a push to make the workweek four days rather than five, and an increasing pile of research and evidence supports the idea. Buffer is one company that started a four-day week as an experiment, The Atlantic reported, and has decided to stick with it.
There's a simultaneous debate happening over the 9-5, along similar lines. Plenty of evidence shows that most people can only do about five hours of productive work every day, so why make them stay at their computer three hours longer? The industry is talking a lot about work-life balance right now; maybe the answer is just less work and more life.
In that spirit, we're out of here. Happy weekend!
A recent study from the University of California-Berkeley and Brandeis University found that when Amazon raised their starting wage to $15/hr, the average hourly wage in the surrounding area rose by 4.7% as other employers followed their lead.
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Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled the name of Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket. This story was updated on June 18, 2021.
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