Jeffrey Bezos goes into space

A FEW MINUTES after 1pm Universal Time, on July 20th, Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, a successful online bookshop and parcel-delivery company, and of Blue Origin, an aspiring rocket firm, became the first billionaire in space. Or maybe not the first. It rather depends on your definition of “space”.Mr Bezos and three companions—his brother Mark; Wally Funk, an American woman who trained as an astronaut in the 1960s on an unofficial, privately sponsored programme, but did not fly into space; and Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old Dutch physics student, who thus unarguably became the youngest astronaut ever—blasted off in one of Blue Origin’s human-rated capsules, mounted on top of a New Shepard reusable rocket. The rocket launched the capsule on a trajectory that would culminate above an altitude of 100km. The capsule then separated and carried on into space, while the rocket returned to a landing pad 3km downrange of its launch site in Culberson county, Texas. Its jaunt complete, the capsule, too, then parachuted back to Earth.