Blue Origin's founder Jeff Bezos

Amazon’s CEO and World Billionaire, Jeff Bezos announced in an Instagram post on Monday, that he is flying to space alongside his brother Mark on July 20. The flight will take place via Blue Origin’s rocket ship named “New Shepard”, which is Bezos’s landmark in the aerospace industry. The flight will take place just after 15 days of Bezos's resignation as Amazon’s CEO.

Blue Origin spent six years developing the space tourism rocket, New Shepard. Soon after its development stage, the company scheduled a date for its first commercial passenger mission in May. The passenger who will accompany Bezos and Mark will be the winner of the online auction being held on Blue Origin’s website. The current high bid is $2.8 Million and the auction will conclude on Saturday. Following the auction, the earnings will be donated to a youth-focused foundation called “Club for the Future”, which aims at inspiring kids to study science and technology.

New Shepard is an entirely autonomous spacecraft that consist of two reusable components, i.e., a small, dome-shaped capsule with wide rectangular windows, and a sixty-foot tall rocket booster that will blasts off the capsule at up to 3 times the speed of sound as it will race toward the outer space. The spacecraft can carry about six passengers and has undergone 15 test flights with empty cabins till now.

With this plan, Jeff Bezos is set to become the first billionaire to travel to space. Virgin Galactic’s Richard Branson and SpaceX’s Elon Musk have yet to commit to human spaceflight.

Currently, Blue Origin is also working on the development of a towering rocket named “New Glenn”, which is expected to be used for sending US government and commercial satellites to orbit. 

Bezos has continually invested his efforts and time in Blue Origin and intends to continue his work in this segment because he believes that if one doesn’t invest in space then the humans will end up in an immobilized civilization, which he thinks, is quite unsettling for the human race.