Just two weeks later he steps down as CEO of Amazon, Bezos will climb aboard a rocket made by his space exploration company Blue Origin.
“If you find the earth from space, it affects you. It changes your relationship with this planet, with humanity. It’s one ground,” Bezos said in a movie submitted to Instagram on Monday morning.
“Ever since I was five years old, I have dreamed of traveling to space.”
Blue Origin’s rocket is called New Shepard, and it’s reusable — the thought being that reusing rockets will diminish the expense of going to space and make it even more accessible. The pressurized capsule has room for six passengers. There are not any pilots.
This will be the first time a team will be aboard the New Shepard, in a capsule attached to the rocket.
And it won’t only be Bezos: He invited his brother Mark, too.
Wish to join the Bezos brothers?
You may bid on a chair on the flight in an auction that benefits Blue Origin’s base, which has the mission of inspiring future generations to pursue careers in STEM.
Bezos gives up his CEO title on July 5, when he’ll pass the reins into Andy Jassy, who currently leads Amazon’s cloud computing division.
Bezos finished his Instagram article with Blue Origin’s Latin motto, Gradatim Ferociter — which the business translates as”step by step “
What does it mean, Bezos is about”to space”?
Technically, that the Karman line is the elevation at which space starts — roughly 62 miles above sea level.
However, Bezos will not be above that line for long. The flight is expected to last about 11 minutes, and only a little section of that time is above the Karman line, according into a graphic of this flight trajectory on Blue Origin’s website.
The New Shepard’s journey is known as suborbital flight, significance that the rocket isn’t powerful enough to enter Earth’s orbit.
Bezos isn’t alone in paying a portion of his tremendous wealth on space exploration.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX Crew Dragon now regularly carries astronauts to and from the International Space Station. And in May, a test flight by Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic attained an altitude of 55 miles, marking its third human spaceflight.
But Musk nor Branson has traveled to space yet in their businesses’ aircrafts.
In 2014, two pilots were aboard a Virgin Galactic test flight which crashed California’s Mojave Desert, murdering one of them. An investigation found that pilot error and design problems were to blame in the crash.
