Late in July, billionaire business magnate and founder of Amazon made a ten-minute round trip in a on a vehicle known as New Shepard. Only this was no ordinary trip to the shops for a few groceries; New Shepard is a rocket ship, and Bezos, alongside three others, made a quick joy flight into outer space in it. So, who even is this guy, and why did he want to go to space?
Who is Jeff Bezos?
Jeff Bezos was born in New Mexico in 1964, and spent the bulk of his childhood in Houston and Miami. At 22 years of age he graduated from Princeton University, and subsequently began working on Wall Street up until 1994, when he began Amazon on a road trip between New York and Seattle and started the road towards becoming one of the wealthiest people in the history of humankind.
Because 27 years later, that little company he founded in a car has expanded to become one of the biggest in the world. Amazon is now the largest company in all of the following areas:
-Revenue for an internet company -All online sales companies -Providers of virtual assistants
Unsurprisingly, the incredible growth which the company he founded has seen has resulted in some fairly substantial financial gains for Bezos, and as a result he was officially named the world’s richest man by Forbes in 2018. As of last year, his net worth was estimated at over $200 billion USD, which it turns out, is more than enough to develop your own space craft and take a joy flight into the cosmos.
The details of the trip
It was on July 20 at approximately 2:12pm that Bezos, alongside his brother Mark, 82-year-old Wally Funk, and an 18-year-old student called Oliver Daemen. They left from Texas, at a private launch site near a tiny town near the Mexican border called Van Horn, jetting into the air inside a capsule within the rocket.
After a couple of minutes, that capsule detached itself from the rocket (don’t worry, it was supposed to), before continuing on its merry way towards space. For four minutes, the four occupants experienced a sensation of weightlessness that very few human beings have, before – almost as quickly as it begun – the trip was over. In total the trip last exactly ten minutes and ten seconds, heading past what is known as the Karman Line to a total of 106 kilometres high. It landed a couple of miles from where it started, parachuting back to a desert which, while vast, pales in comparison to where they had been.
Why did he do it?
It’s certainly a question that many have raised. It wasn’t an exploratory mission, there wasn’t any perceived benefit to humanity as there often is in such trips – so why bother? And it appears that the simplest answer is also the right one – he has the means and wanted to do it, so why not?
It’s certainly not the first time that Bezos has shown an interest in the world outside of planet earth. From a young age he showed an affinity for science, and as a student at the University of Florida he went to the Student Science Training Program, from where he made a memorable graduation speech which highlighted his interest in outer space. He noted a desire to remove humankind from the earth and make our planet into ‘a huge national park’, and that it was his dream to colonize space.
So his fascination was pretty clear from relatively early in his life. Of course, there are plenty of people who are interested in space and not many of them actually get to go there, but Bezos has the resources to do so and evidently decided to make the most of them. The trip, however, was not without its detractors.
Criticisms
It’s hard to do a whole lot these days without being on the receiving end of some criticism, and unsurprisingly a billionaire jetting off to space for a few minutes wasn’t exempt. Predominantly these criticisms surrounded what is referred to as the ‘billionaire space race’ – essentially the desire for Bezos and other similarly wealthy individuals to fly to space – and the lack of purpose it serves, with many citing the fact that the exorbitant amounts of money it involves could easily be used for more valuable causes – most notably on the environment, given that is what the passion to visit space is based upon.
Certainly there is some validity to this argument, though Bezos has shown dedication to the environment. His counter to the criticisms is that polluting industries ultimately need to be moved to space – a similar reference to what he made in his aforementioned graduation speech – and that joy flights like his are small initial steps which allow us to ‘practice over and over’.
Whether this is true or just a convenient way to justify the trip is up to you. Regardless, it sounds like a truly memorable day for one of the world’s richest people – and, of course, a few lucky passengers.
