Jeff Bezos, world’s richest person, completes trip to space

Amazon.com and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos and his three crew mates have successfully landed after embarking on a space mission 20 years in the making.

On Tuesday, Bezos, his brother, Mark Bezos, veteran pilot Wally Funk and Dutch student Oliver Daemen blasted off on a 10-minute suborbital flight aboard the New Shepard rocket in a giant leap forward for commercial space travel.

The flight is a huge milestone for Blue Origin, which was founded by Bezos in 2000, as Tuesday’s launch marked the first time one of the company’s New Shepard spacecraft carried people.

Bezos and the other passengers experienced about three minutes of weightlessness and stunning views through what the company boasts are the largest windows ever built on a space capsule.

After free-floating briefly, the crew strapped into their seats once more before plunging back into the lower atmosphere and parachuting down to land.

New Shepard’s suborbital flight was designed to take the crew past the Kármán Line, the internationally recognized boundary of space, at nearly 330,000 feet, or roughly 62 miles above the Earth.

That will give Bezos and Blue Origin — which he founded in 2000 — bragging rights over Virgin Galactic’s Richard Branson, whose flight earlier this month aboard SpaceShipTwo hit a peak altitude of around 282,000 feet, surpassing NASA’s designated Earth-Space boundary of 50 miles, but falling well short of the Kármán Line.

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