An “ honored guest” aboard the capsule, Funk said in a CBS interview this month: “I love flying, that’s my job, that’s what I love. Wally Funk, 82, trained as an astronaut in the 1960s as part of the semi-official women’s Mercury 13 project, but Nasa policy dictated only men could fly. The crew features both the oldest and youngest humans to travel into space. The debut crewed flight of New Shepard, named after Alan Shepard, the first American in space in 1961, it is scheduled for launch on the 52nd anniversary of the day Apollo 11 astronauts placed the first footprints on the moon.

He was intrigued by the idea of rocketing into outer space,” his Miami high school girlfriend Ursula Werner once said, something Bezos said in 2016 he could “ neither confirm nor deny”.

“Jeff started Amazon just to get enough money to do Blue Origin. Intended to showcase what Bezos hopes will become a prolific and lucrative venture into the fledgling industry of space tourism, the flight will also mark the realization of a long-held dream for the 57-year-old tycoon. We have to do both.”īezos, who has outlined a vision where all polluting industry is relocated to other planets and Earth becomes purely “residential”, said that the mission was aimed at “building a road to space for the next generations”. We have lots of problems here and now on Earth and we need to work on those and we also need to look to the future, we’ve always done that as a species and as a civilization. In a separate interview with CNN, Bezos said some friends had cautioned against taking the very first Blue Origin space flight but that he was confident in the safety of the rocket.Īsked about criticism that he was taking a rich person’s “joyride” instead of focusing on problems on Earth, Bezos his critics are “largely right – we have to do both. “This vehicle is ready, this crew is ready, we are feeling really good about it.” “I’m excited, I’m not really nervous,” Bezos told CBS’s This Morning on Monday. The world’s richest man and his crewmates plan to soar into the heavens above Texas at 8am local time (2pm BST) in the first human spaceflight of his company Blue Origin’s sub-orbital New Shepard rocket.

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