Blue Origin's Historic Flight Is A Success
MIAMI (CBSMiami) - Amazon founder and Palmetto Senior High School Alumni Jeff Bezos along with three others landed safely in a west Texas desert after Blue Origin's historic flight.
The New Shepard capsule lifted off just after 9 a.m.
Climbing straight up atop 110,000 pounds of push, the rocket rapidly accelerated as it consumed its load of supercold liquid oxygen and hydrogen propellants.
At an altitude of about 45 miles, the booster rocket separated from the capsule, allowing it to fly on its won. Bezos and his fellow astronauts floated in microgravity for a few minutes before parachutes and thruster rockets helped land the capsule at 9:22 a.m.
The capsule reached a high point of just above 63 miles and the ride lasted roughly ten minutes.
The reusable booster rocket, meanwhile, plunged tail first back to Earth and successfully landed on a pad about two miles from the launch site.
Before the launch, Bezos told CBS This Morning host Gayle King he was not nervous.
"We've been training, this vehicle is ready, this crew is ready. This team is amazing we just feel really good about it," he said.
Oliver Daemen, 18, won his seat for the flight in an auction. It makes him the company's first space tourist.
Also in the capsule was Bezos' brother Mark and 82-year-old aviation pioneer Wally Funk, who is now the oldest person to go into space.
Funk, who was barred from NASA's initially all-male astronaut corps in the 1960s, finally got her chance to prove the naysayers wrong, realizing a lifelong dream.
Tuesday, July 20th, is the 52nd anniversary of the lunar landing in 1969. Bezos says his love of space history is the reason why this date was chosen for the launch.