All eyes were on superbillionaire Jeff Bezos on July 20. Nothing that he has done before attracted this much attention. It had all the makings of a gripping spectacle. The world’s richest man along with three other passengers were rocketing to the edge of space on a vehicle that has never carried human passengers before.
You’ve got to admit: There’s always the possibility that a trip into space could end in tragedy. When Craig Heidecker, CEO of rocket company Farpoint, boarded his firm’s spacecraft on a mission to the International Space Station, the rocket blew up in fiery explosion a few seconds after take-off.
OK, I know, that was just a scene during the third season of the Showtime drama series Billions—in an episode cleverly entitled “Hell of a Ride.” That TV episode captured the perils involved in human spaceflight.
Thank goodness life does not always imitate art. After giving its four passengers a few minutes of weightlessness beyond the Karman Line and a breath-taking view of Earth, the New Shepard crew capsule made its way back to Earth’s atmosphere and parachuted onto the West Texas desert for a soft landing.
Soon after the dust settled, a jubilant Jeff Bezos donning his inescapable cowboy hat emerged from the landed crew capsule, declaring the experience his “Best day ever!” Next to step out was Oliver Daemen, an 18-year old paying passenger from Netherlands, who was a replacement for an unnamed bidder who paid an unbelievable $28 million for a chance to be on the New Shepard’s historic maiden manned flight only to back out at the last minute, citing a “scheduling conflict.” Daemen was followed by Wally Funk, a vivacious 82-year old former aviator, who was personally invited by Bezos to be on this flight. Finally, there was Mark Bezos, the Blue Origin founder’s brother, who accompanied his sibling in the fulfillment of his lifelong dream of flying to space.
“I wasn’t that nervous but my family was somewhat anxious about this,” the Washington Post quoted the Blue Origin founder as saying.
Blue’s Blitz
By all accounts, this media event was a tremendous success for Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin. Most media outlets covered this space launch. The major networks and cable news channels had reporters on the scene and live discussions with experts in the studio. Noted pundits and podcasters who do not normally talk about the space industry also weighed in on this event.
Not all publicity was positive, though. Bezos was lambasted for half-jokingly commenting that his trip to space was paid for by Amazon employees and customers. Already facing criticism for not giving away enough to charity, the wealthiest man on Earth made a rather tone-deaf comment.
Nonetheless, it did not matter that half of the media gave Bezos favorable coverage, and the other half rebuked him. The Blue Origin founder basked in the limelight owing to all the publicity generated by his spaceflight.
It could be that the media attention was due to the fact that the world’s richest man was blasting into space on his rocket’s maiden crewed flight, not because Blue Origin’s suborbital rocket is the latest breakthrough in space technology.
All the same, Bezos shrewdly used the opportunity to enhance his personal image and promote his business endeavors. You’ve got to hand it to Bezos’s PR team: The Blue Origin founder’s flight to space was a well-choreographed publicity event.
Right after his space flight, the ultra high net worth Blue Origin boss announced that he was donating $100 million each to TV personalities Van Jones and José Andrés towards charities of their own choosing. What better timing for a public figure to highlight his philanthropy than the day when he’s got the media’s attention.
While he’s at it, the ruler of retail also emphasized his commitment to protect the environment. Said Bezos in describing planet Earth as he looked at her from space:
“When you get up there and you see it, you see how tiny it is and how fragile it is. We need to take all heavy industry, all polluting industry and move it into space, and keep Earth as this beautiful gem of a planet that it is.”
Moreover, it would seem that Bezos tore off a page from Elon Musk’s PR handbook, and mimicked the way the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla scored free publicity for the Tesla Model X, a mid-size luxury crossover manufactured by the world’s biggest electric car maker. During Jeff Bezos’s ‘best day ever,’ a Rivian four-door SUV transported the four would-be passengers of New Shepard to the Blue Origin launch pad in Van Horn, Texas, giving the yet to be sold EV some premium exposure. Amazon, Jeff Bezos’s e-commerce and cloud computing company, is an early investor in the electric vehicle startup.
Being Bezos
The founder and former CEO of e-commerce giant Amazon.com enjoys mind-blowing luxuries, including a $500 million super yacht, a $65 million Gulfstream private jet, and a number of ritzy mansions and condominiums across the U.S.
Despite going through the most expensive divorce settlement in history only two years ago, where his wife Mackenzie Bezos was awarded $38 billion, Jeff Bezos remains as the world’s wealthiest man, with a net worth of $185.8 billion.
Bezos’s wealth is greater than the 2020 GDP of Greece, Hungary, or Ukraine. If Bezos were a country, he would have been the 52nd richest nation, thumbing his nose at 139 other states across the globe.
You can just imagine how awesome it is to be Jeff Bezos, but as it turns out not everything is rosy in Bezosville.
Jeff Bezos’s public persona is mired in ironies. For one thing, he is obviously on the liberal side of the political spectrum like most tech titans in the U.S. today, but progressive liberals have excoriated him for allegedly exploiting Amazon workers and busting unions. For another, Bezos owns the Washington Post—one of the two biggest newspapers in the U.S.—but he sure gets a lot of bad press from the liberal media.
Bezos therefore is in an unusual position in which people from the both sides of the political aisle scowl at him with daggers drawn for varying reasons.
Furthermore, tens of thousands of people wished Bezos never came back when he went to space.
Soon after Blue Origin announced in June that Bezos will be on board the New Shepard on its maiden crewed flight, someone set up an online petition on change.org to not allow the Blue Origin founder to return to Earth. Albeit a tongue-in-cheek proposition, it garnered quite a following, with more than 160,000 people signing the petition on the eve of Bezos’s space flight. More than a month after his space capsule’s re-entry, people are still signing the petition. It now has more than 197,000 signatures.
Astro-Not
For all the hoopla surrounding the Blue Origin space flight, Bezos and the three other passengers might not be considered astronauts after all.
On the same day that the quartet of New Shepard passengers blasted off to space, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) modified its policy as to who should be called an ‘astronaut.’
To receive astronaut wings, the FAA now requires a passenger who has flown to space to have “demonstrated activities during flight that were essential to public safety, or contributed to human space flight safety,” reported the USA Today.
Bezos and company did not do any of those given that the New Shepard is a fully autonomous rocket and capsule.
Funny Shape
There was something about Jeff Bezos’s suborbital rocket and capsule that elicited attention.
People on social media talked not so much about the marvels of Blue Origin’s rocketry as the undeniable phallic shape of the 60-foot New Shepard rocket and capsule. You can’t blame the netizens. The resemblance is unmistakable. Watching it soar into space might have been a comical spectacle to some people.
Oh myyy. That…shape. https://t.co/3lPO7cFpVj
— George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) July 20, 2021
Every time the New Shepard launches in the future, people are not likely to look at it in different way.
It’s not hard to imagine Alan Shepard, who is up there in astronaut heaven, smiling sheepishly and shaking his head amid all this talk about the funny shape of the rocket that was named after him.
You have to wonder: How did Bezos or his rocket engineers miss the rocket’s controversial shape after developing and testing this suborbital rocket in the last two decades and spending billions of dollars on it? Or you’d think that perhaps there was a lot of ribbing and snickering at Blue Origin all this time, but no one wanted to be the one to say it. It must have been the proverbial elephant in the room.
Certain experts in astrophysics have said that the shape of the New Shepard rocket and capsule makes it aerodynamic. Interestingly, none of the spacecrafts in active use today, such as the Falcon 9, Rocket Lab Neutron, Atlas V, Ariane, and Soyuz, was widely teased for having a laughable shape.
Surprise, Surprise
Jeff Bezos, 57, expected himself to become the first billionaire to reach the cosmos on a spaceship built by his own rocket company. When Blue Origin made a surprise announcement in June that Jeff Bezos and his brother Mark will be on the July 20 first crewed flight of New Shepard, the nation took notice. For a moment, it looked as though the Blue Origin founder’s place in history was secured. But this was not to be.
As it happened, Virgin Galactic made a surprise announcement of its own on July 1, saying that it will launch Richard Branson and five crew members into space in a test flight of its rocket plane, VSS Unity, nine days prior to the Blue Origin launch. This meant that the British entrepreneur would snag the distinction of being the first space entrepreneur to fly on his own spacecraft, and spoil Bezos’s date with history.
”I know that it’s been painted as a race, honestly I don’t think either of us see it that way,” Branson, who moved up his scheduled flight to space, told ABC in an interview.
That is so true. And the moon is a cube.
‘Release, Release, Release’
Richard Branson took quite a risk in his attempt to be the first billionaire to fly to the cosmos on a spaceship built by the space company he heads on account of reported setbacks during its test flights in the past. Virgin Galactic suffered a crash in 2014 of its first space plane, the V.S.S. Enterprise, and perhaps narrowly avoided another disaster in 2019.
The flamboyant British billionaire is not one to turn his back from a risky undertaking, having cheated death on a good many occasions in his lifetime. The guy is a daredevil who likes long-distance balloon flights, bungee-jumping and other activities that gives him adrenaline rush.
When asked by Reuters about his family’s reaction to the news of his imminent space flight, the Virgin Galactic founder had this to say: “As a family, our motto is, ‘The brave men don’t live forever but the cautious do not live at all.’ And so, as a family, we love to say ‘Yes.’”
Branson’s moment of truth happened on July 11 in a city called—by some twist of fate— Truth or Consequences. On that bright Sunday morning in New Mexico, Branson along with three Virgin Galactic employees and two pilots were on board the rocket plane V.S.S. Unity, which was attached to the double-fuselage mothership known as V.M.S. Eve.
Amid cheers from an adoring crowd, the mothership, with VSS Unity in tow, took off at Spaceport America and ascended into the sky. As the carrier craft reached an altitude of 46,340 feet, it let loose VSS Unity, at which point the host of the Virgin Galactic livestream declared: “Release, release, release! Clean release!”
As the space plane dropped like a skydiver, its rocket engine is at once ignited, sending it roaring and soaring to the edge of space at three times the speed of sound. It’s an action-packed adventure like no other you’ve experienced on the ground. This is how James Bond would do a mission to space, or even Ethan Hunt—should he choose to accept it.
In becoming the first billionaire to blast off into space on a spaceship he helped fund, Branson got to be the one to say to the world: “Welcome to the dawn of the new space age!”
Buzz for Space Tourism
The widely publicized jostling between Bezos and Branson as they both tried to be the first to launch into space has one big winner: the nascent space tourism industry.
To a great extent, what the media has dubbed the ‘Billionaire Space Race’ has put commercial space travel at the forefront of America’s consciousness. Say what you will about these dueling entrepreneurs, but they risked their own lives to prove that you don’t need to be a professional astronaut to experience spaceflight.
Happy launching today Richard. May you have clear skies and smooth sailing! (Nice shirt Elon!) 🚀🚀🚀 https://t.co/AQlAHYSyKo https://t.co/fwz7i5wCkS
— Dr. Buzz Aldrin (@TheRealBuzz) July 11, 2021
To be sure, space travel today is affordable only to the super rich. But as rocket technology advances exponentially, the cost of launching rockets and space planes will be dramatically reduced, making space accessible to more people in the not so distant future.
If humanity seeks to broaden its horizons, space travel is the quintessential endeavor that will make that happen. Nothing quite matches the pleasure of gazing at our beautiful Earth in all its glory against the blackness of space.
