Jeff Bezos’ spaceflight company Blue Origin LLC will launch its New Shepard aircraft to space on Tuesday morning with Bezos and three others aboard. The launch will take place from a site in Texas. It comes a week after British Billionaire Richard Branson’s trip to the space.
Here are five things about the Blue Origin’s flight:
How to watch
You can live stream the coverage at 7:30 am ET (5pm IST) on Blue Origin’s website and Twitter handle. The flight itself is scheduled to last about 10 to 12 minutes.
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Passengers
Bezos will be accompanied by his brother Mark Bezos, 82-year-old Wally Funk, female astronaut who was denied the chance to go to space and Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old Dutch student, who will be the youngest person to travel to space.
Also read: How to become a space tourist
Cost
Ticket prices for space travel are expected to come down from the millions of dollars range, but remain pricey for years to come. Virgin Galactic analyst at Canaccord Genuity, Ken Herbert, predicts that the average ticket, for now, will go for a few hundred thousand dollars. He recently said he expects that to climb to about $500,000 by 2030.
Also read | All you need to know about Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ first trip to space
Insurance
There is no insurance of space passenger as of now but it could be on the way. “There’s no insurance on the lives of the people [on the flight],” Chris Kunstadter, global head of space underwriting at AXA XL, the commercial insurance division of insurance giant AXA S.A. , (AXAHY) told Barron’s. But “the product that we’re working on developing would be to insure against bodily injury to the space flight participants themselves,” he added.
The Owner
Bezos made his fortune from online retailer Amazon.com (AMZN), which has branched into numerous other businesses and now has a market value of $1.8 trillion. He is one of the wealthiest people in the world. He purchased the Washington Post for $250 million in 2013. Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000, well before Amazon reached profitability. Bezos said he has wanted to travel to space since he was a young child.
