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Countdown to Bezos’ suborbital flight – Space & Astronomy

On the day when the world remembers the 52nd anniversary of the historic Apollo 11 landing on the moon, the oldest and youngest space tourist, an 82-year-old and an 18-year-old, will experience the condition of microgravity for about three minutes. weightlessness that astronauts feel in their flights. The 82-year-old Wally Funk, and the 18-year-old Oliver Daemen will, in fact, be among the protagonists of the suborbital flight of billionaire Jeff Bezos, patron of the space company Blue Origin. It will happen within days of the suborbital flight of another billionaire, Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson.

The launch of Bezos is scheduled at 3:00 pm (Italian time) on Tuesday 20 July from the Texas desert, aboard the New Shepard unmanned shuttle, on its 16 / o flight but first with a crew. The fourth passenger will be Bezos’ brother Mark.

The July 20 launch “marks the beginning of commercial operations for New Shepard,” said Bob Smith, CEO of Blue Origin. Wally Funk is an aviation pioneer. A former pilot, in 1961 she had been involved in the NASA women’s training program, Mercury, which was later canceled. Make your long-awaited dream come true now.

Oliver Daemen, a space enthusiast since he was a child, is the son of manager Joes Daemen, who had participated in the auction launched by Bezos to host a paying passenger. He takes the place of the winner, who remained anonymous, who had won the auction with 28 million dollars and then gave up due to work problems. It will fly in a subsequent launch. Young Oliver has a private pilot’s license and plans to start studying physics at the Dutch University of Utrecht in September. For the CEO of Blue Origin, “he represents a new generation of people who will help us build a path to space”.

Bezos and his three travel companions will reach approximately 100 kilometers of altitude. They will be able to observe the outside through the large windows of the New Shepard shuttle, among the largest for such a vehicle. The shuttle will intersect its trajectory with that of the atmosphere, as the Branson aircraft did on July 11, and then return to Earth thanks to parachutes.

The big news is that it will do it with its own means, thus marking a radical change 20 years after the first flight of a space tourist, that of the American billionaire Dennis Tito, who on April 28, 2001 left with a Russian Soyuz shuttle to the Space Station. (Iss), aboard which he remained for eight days.

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