Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man, reached space in his company’s first flight

Van Horn: Jeff Bezos blasted into space with people on the first flight of his rocket company on Tuesday, becoming the second billionaire in just over a week to ride his own spacecraft.

The Amazon founder was accompanied by a hand-picked group: his brother, an 18-year-old from the Netherlands, and an 82-year-old aviation pioneer from Texas, the youngest and oldest to fly in space.

Named after America’s first astronaut, Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket lifted off from far west Texas on the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, a date chosen by Bezos for its historical significance.

He caught on to it fast, even as Virgin Galactic’s Richard Branson outsmarts his own flight from New Mexico in the race for space tourist dollars and beats them to space by nine days.

Unlike Branson’s piloted rocket plane, Bezos’s capsule was fully automated and required no official personnel on board for an estimated 10 minutes, up and down flight.

Blue Origin was shooting for an altitude of about 66 miles (106 kilometers), which is 10 miles (16 kilometers) higher than Branson’s July 11 ride. The 60-foot (18-m) booster accelerated to Mach 3, or three times the speed of sound, to get high enough, before detaching the capsule and aiming for a vertical landing.

Passengers expected to get three to four minutes of weightlessness to float around the giant white capsule. Then the window-filled capsule was on its way to a parachute touchdown on the desert floor, with Bezos and his guests experiencing nearly six times the force of gravity, or 6G, on the way back.

sharing Bezos’s dream-cum-true adventure Wally Funk, from the Dallas area, was one of 13 female pilots who went through the same tests as NASA’s all-male astronaut corps in the early 1960s, but never made it to space.

Joining him on Ultimate Joyride was the company’s first paying customer, Oliver Damon, a last-minute fill-in for the mystery winner of the $28 million auction, who opted for the latter flight. The Dutch teen’s father took part in the auction, and last week agreed to a lower undisclosed price when Blue Origin offered his son a vacant seat.

Blue Origin, founded by Bezos in 2000 in Kent, Washington, near Amazon’s Seattle headquarters, has not yet opened ticket sales to the public or disclosed the price. For now, this auction is booking bidders. Blue Origin CEO Bob Smith said two more passenger flights are planned by the end of the year.

According to company officials, the recycled rocket and capsule carrying Tuesday’s passengers were used in the last two space demonstrations.

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