VAN HORN, Tex. — Jeff Bezos rocketed past the edge of space Tuesday, launching from the improbable spaceport he has built in the West Texas desert here and fulfilling the lifelong dream of a die-hard Trekkie who was transfixed by the Apollo 11 moon landing and has pledged to use his fortune to open space for the masses.

Lifting off at 9:12 a.m. Eastern time, the New Shepard rocket that <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/jeff-bezos-pulls-back-the-curtain-on-his-plans-for-space/2016/03/09/a0716c7e-e5f4-11e5-a6f3-21ccdbc5f74e_story.html?itid=lk_inline_manual_2">Bezos’s Blue Origin space venture</a> has been developing for years carried one of the most unusual astronaut crews ever to depart Earth. In addition to Bezos, on board the capsule were Bezos’s brother, Mark; <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/07/01/wally-funk-jeff-bezos-blue-origin-space/">Wally Funk, an 82-year-old aviation pioneer</a>, and Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old student from the Netherlands who lucked into the flight when the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/05/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-space-auction/">winner of an auction</a> for the fourth seat had to postpone. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

The launch set a record for both the oldest and youngest person to fly to space and came nine days after Richard Branson flew on a similar suborbital trajectory. The back-to-back launches amounted to yet another sign of space exploration’s modern renaissance, a movement that is being <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/06/17/china-space-race-nasa/">fueled not by nations</a> but by a surging commercial space industry backed by billionaires.

Bezos said Tuesday Blue Origin is approaching $100 million in sales of seats on future flights.

As space travel goes, Blue Origin’s flight was a modest, up-and-down, suborbital jaunt, just over 66.5 miles high, a mere toe dip in the vastness of the cosmos that lasted just over 10 minutes from launch to landing. But for Blue Origin, which Bezos founded in 2000, it marked a significant milestone — the company’s first human spaceflight — and a statement that it was staking a claim in a modern space race that has been dominated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

Last month, Bezos, 57, announced <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/06/07/jeff-bezos-space-blue-origin/">he would be on the flight</a>, a move that surprised few who know Bezos’s passion for space. Blue Origin, he has said, is “the most important work I’m doing.” Now that Bezos has stepped down as CEO of Amazon, many in the space industry expect him to dedicate more of his time to his space venture, which has large ambitions but has lagged behind its competitors.

It is fighting to win a piece of a major NASA contract to fly astronauts to the moon, for example, a major program in which Bezos has taken a personal interest. He watched the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969, a “seminal” moment for him, he says, that touched off a lifelong passion for space exploration. He grew up devouring science fiction and watching reruns of “Star Trek.” He loved the show so much that he named his dog Kamala, and the lobby of Blue Origin’s headquarters, just south of Seattle, is outfitted with all sorts of space artifacts, including a rocket ship model, shaped like a bullet, inspired by Jules Verne.

Amazon, he has said, was the winning “lottery ticket” that allowed him to fund Blue Origin to the tune of $1 billion a year.

During an event after the flight that had been billed as a news conference but where only three questions were asked, Bezos said, “I want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer because you guys paid for all of this.”

He said his expectations for the flight “were high, and they were dramatically exceeded.”

“The zero G piece may have been one of the biggest surprises because it felt so normal,” he said. “It felt almost like as humans we have evolved to be in that environment, which I know is impossible, but it felt so serene and nice and peaceful.”

Bezos said the crew brought a number of items of historical significance on the flight: a piece of canvas from the Wright Flyer, the airplane flown by the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk, N.C., in 1903 for the first powered flight; a bronze medallion made from the first hot air balloon ever to fly in 1783; and a pair of goggles that Amelia Earhart wore when she flew across the Atlantic Ocean solo.

Funk said she had a wonderful time on board the spacecraft, and during a video from when the crew reached space, she could be seen rising weightless out of her seat. The crew brought ping-pong balls that they floated around the capsule, and at one point, Bezos could be heard yelling, “Who wants a Skittle?” They then took turns trying to throw the candies into each other’s mouths.

“I loved it,” Funk said. “The four of us, we had such a great time. It was wonderful. I want to go again.” She added that she only “wished it had been longer” and said that at times the capsule was a bit tight to have everyone doing somersaults and rolls at once. “There was not quite enough room for all four of us to do all those things,” she said.

New Shepard is named for Alan Shepard, the first American in space, who flew on a suborbital trajectory during the Mercury program in 1961. Shepard’s launch carried him to an altitude of 116 miles and lasted more than 15 minutes. Shepard’s daughters were on hand to witness the flight. Bezos said that he was “honored” to have them there and that it was a privilege to honor him and the early days of the space program.

For Bezos, the journey to this day began in the early 2000s, when <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Space-Barons-Bezos-Colonize-Cosmos/dp/1610398297">he started quietly acquiring</a> hundreds of thousands of acres in West Texas, purchasing the land under corporate entities named for explorers. There was Joliet Holdings and Cabot Enterprises, the James Cook and William Clark Partnerships and Coronado Ventures.

All were linked to a Seattle firm called Zefram LLC, named for Zefram Cochrane, another character in the “Star Trek” franchise. As he was scouting the land in 2003, a helicopter carrying Bezos crashed in a creek, flooding the cabin with water before Bezos and his companions could escape.

“It was harrowing,” he later told The Post. “We were very lucky. I can’t believe we all walked away from it.”

His flight Tuesday was far smoother. The <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/07/18/blue-origin-launches-again-it-gets-closer-flying-humans-first-time/">rocket fired its engines</a> for nearly 2½ minutes, powering the capsule to about Mach 3, or three times the speed of sound. The capsule then separated, allowing the four-member crew to float around and take in views of the Earth below and the galaxy beyond through what the Blue Origin touts as the largest windows ever to fly in space.

Once it hit apogee, or the high point, the capsule fell back toward the Texas desert, touching down softly under three parachutes. The more aerodynamically shaped booster beat the capsule back to the ground by a couple of minutes, landing on a pad after reigniting its engine to slow down.

Bezos was first to exit the capsule, wearing a cowboy hat and hugging his mother. Friends and family members swarmed the newly minted astronauts as they emerged, popping champagne and having a celebration next to the capsule on the desert floor. “I wasn’t that nervous but my family was somewhat anxious about this,” Bezos said after the flight.

It was not only Bezos’s dream to fly to space, but Funk’s as well. In the early 1960s, she was <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/07/01/wally-funk-jeff-bezos-blue-origin-space/">selected to be part of the Mercury 13</a>, a group of women who went through a privately funded program designed to mimic the NASA training for John Glenn and the rest of the Mercury 7. Ultimately the program was canceled, and none of the women were selected as part of the astronaut corps.

Funk went on to have a pioneering career as an aviator, spending nearly 20,000 hours flying all sorts of aircraft. She was the first female inspector for the Federal Aviation Administration and the first female air safety investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board.

The last seat on the flight was supposed to go to the winner of an auction. The winner, who remains anonymous, paid $28 million for the right to fly alongside Bezos, but Blue Origin announced last week the person could not make it <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/07/15/blueoriginjeffbezos28millionauctionspace/">because of “scheduling conflicts.”</a>

That paved the way for Daemen, who is planning to enroll in college in the Netherlands this fall. Blue Origin has declined to say how much Daemen, whose father runs an investment firm, paid for the flight. But the company said he was scheduled to go on Blue Origin’s second launch after participating in the auction but was bumped up when the auction winner postponed.

Bezos invited his brother, Mark, a philanthropist who has worked as a volunteer firefighter in suburban New York, to join the crew as well.

Blue Origin has not yet announced how much it would charge the public for future flights on New Shepard. It has said it was offering premium prices for the first flights to those who participated in the auction, and it said on its live stream before Tuesday’s launch that it was receiving many orders.

A <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/06/08/space-tourism-wealthy-bezos-musk-branson/">suborbital space tourism business</a>, though, is only one of the many programs Blue Origin is pursuing as it works toward Bezos’s long-term vision of a future where there are “millions of people living and working in space.”

It is developing a much larger and more powerful rocket, called New Glenn, that would be capable of lifting large masses to orbit. It also has partnered with Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper to develop a spacecraft capable of ferrying astronauts to and from the surface of the moon.

It won the first round of NASA’s contract. But earlier this year, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/16/nasa-lunar-lander-contract-spacex/">NASA awarded SpaceX a $3 billion</a> contract for the first lunar landing mission under the space agency’s Artemis program. NASA says it will offer a competition for future moon missions, but <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/26/jeff-bezos-challenges-nasa-moon-contract-award-elon-musks-spacex/">Blue Origin has protested</a> the contract award to the Government Accountability Office. That decision is due in a couple of weeks and could continue to fuel the competition between Musk and Bezos, who over the years have sparred over their achievements in space.

Blue Origin also recently took a shot at Virgin Galactic after Branson announced he would move up his flight and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/07/11/richard-branson-virgin-galactic-live-updates/">reach space before Bezos</a>.

But Bezos ended up wishing his rival well. <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/09/15/jeff-bezos-on-nuclear-reactors-in-space-the-lack-of-bacon-on-mars-and-humanitys-destiny-in-the-solar-system/">During an event in 2016, he said</a>: “Competition is super healthy. … And space is really big. There is room for a lot of winners.”

At Blue Origin, “our biggest opponent is gravity,” he added. “The physics of this problem are challenging enough. … Gravity is not watching us and saying, ‘Uh-oh, those Blue Origin guys are getting really good. I’m going to have to increase my gravitational constant.’ Gravity doesn’t care about us at all.”

US-space-TOURISM-BlueOrigin

Blue Origin minted four new astronauts in the private company’s momentous rocket launch in West Texas.

Jeff Bezos, Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen safely exited the crew capsule following their 10-minute New Shepard trip, which sent them more than 351,000 feet into the air and back. Audio captured the crew cheering in zero gravity before the capsule successfully parachuted to the ground.

The Amazon CEO exited the hatch first, donning a cowboy hat and giving a thumbs-up to onlookers. The rest of the crew followed, hugging family members on the ground as news cameras snapped photos. They then popped champagne bottles to mark the historic feat, described as a “picture perfect” launch by Gary Lai, Blue Origin’s senior director.

“Congratulations to all of Team Blue past and present on reaching this historic moment in spaceflight history. This first astronaut crew wrote themselves into the history books of space, opening the door through which many after will pass,” Blue Origin posted on Twitter.

Dalvin Brown

FILE PHOTO: Founder, Chairman, CEO and President of Amazon Jeff Bezos unveils his space company Blue Origin's space exploration lunar lander rocket called Blue Moon during an unveiling event in Washington

New Shepard is the first step in a long line of projects Blue Origin is pursuing. The company is also developing a much larger rocket (so large that New Shepard would be able to fit inside the fairing, or nose cone) called New Glenn.

With a first stage powered by seven BE-4 engines that burn liquid oxygen and liquefied natural gas, it generates nearly 4 million pounds of thrust at sea level.

The rocket was supposed to fly last year but has been postponed, and the company now says it won’t fly until late next year.

In addition to that program, Blue Origin is developing a spacecraft that would fly astronauts to the surface of the moon.

Blue Origin and its partners, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper, had won the most money from NASA in the first round of contracts, finishing first ahead of Dynetics and SpaceX.

But earlier this year, NASA chose SpaceX’s Starship for the first human mission to the moon. That stunned and angered Blue Origin, which has protested the decision and has also lobbied Congress to force NASA to choose a second provider to compete against SpaceX.

The Government Accountability Office is expected to rule on Blue Origin’s protest by Aug. 4. A House bill has authorized $1.34 billion for the lander program and “urges NASA to bolster competition in lander development and production.” NASA has said it would have competitions for subsequent moon landings.

Christian Davenport

The New Shepard capsule carrying Jeff and Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen has touched down in the West Texas desert under a trio of parachutes and on a pillow of air provided by a short retro-thruster burst.

The New Shepard booster that propelled the crew capsule just past the edge of space has landed by reigniting its BE-3 engine for a soft touchdown.

The New Shepard capsule carrying Jeff and Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen has reached space and is nearing its high point, also known as apogee. If all  went according to plan, the crew should be floating around the cabin, taking in views of Earth from above and the stars beyond.

After a few minutes, they will strap themselves back into their seats and begin the descent back to Earth. As the capsule reenters the atmosphere, they will experience the force of 5 Gs, or five times the force of gravity for a few seconds.

Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket was held back temporarily as it prepared to shoot Jeff Bezos and three other crew members into space.

While the launch was set for lift off around 9 a.m. Eastern time, the private company wants to take every precaution to ensure that the crew feels comfortable and that the weather won’t be an issue.

“We have a lot of time; we can take our time. It’s better to pause and hold if there’s any reason to,” said Blue Origin senior director Gary Lai during a live stream.

The hold was lifted and launch was scheduled for about 9:12 a.m.

The New Shepard rocket, carrying Jeff and Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen has lifted off from Blue Origin’s launch site in West Texas. The flight is expected to reach a high point of more than 62 miles before it falls back to Earth.

If all goes well, the booster will fly back to a soft landing, and the capsule will touch down a few minutes later under three parachutes. The entire flight is expected to last about 10 minutes.

Jeff Bezos and the three accompanying crew members have boarded the New Shepard space capsule set to autonomously take off and land vertically in Blue Origin’s first manned flight.

The crew members made their way up a long flight of stairs toward the rocket’s hatch, where they will remain during the 10-minute-or-so trip to space and back.

Joining the Amazon founder onboard are his brother, Mark Bezos; aviation trailblazer Wally Funk, who will be the oldest person ever to fly in space at 82 years old; and Oliver Daemen, 18, a Dutch student who will be the youngest person ever to launch.

FILE PHOTO: A general view of the Blue Origin New Shepard rocket booster at the 33rd Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colorado

Blue Origin’s mascot is the tortoise, and its founder, Jeff Bezos, likes to say that “slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.” But the company has been criticized for moving too slowly, especially when compared to Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which made it to orbit years ago and has been flying people there for more than a year.

But Blue Origin’s slow, at times plodding, approach is deliberate, company officials have said, allowing it to fully test the New Shepard vehicle. The company has flown it successfully 15 times, all without any people on board. Unlike the space shuttle, which had no emergency abort system, New Shepard’s capsule can be jettisoned away from the booster in the event of an emergency. The company has tested that emergency escape system multiple times, as well as simulating a parachute failure.

In addition to the flight tests, all sorts of work has been done behind the scenes, Gary Lai, the senior director of the New Shepard design team, said in an interview. “The flights are just kind of the tip of the iceberg, the part that floats above the water that people can see,” he said. “We test the vehicle on the ground, the components, the software, many, many more times than we fly them. Up to the point where, when we do the flight tests, we’re actually pretty confident it’s going to work.”

It took a long time, but the company now has a vehicle it is completely confident in.

“As an engineer, you can never dispel the gremlins of unknown unknowns,” Lai said. “There are always going to be things that you wonder, ‘Well, what if I forgot about this?’ But in terms of going into this flight, I’m struggling to think of how much more thorough we could have been and yet still be committed to flying.”

Jeff Bezos likes to say “you don’t pick your passions, your passions pick you.” And the passion that picked him at a very young age was space.

As a 5-year-old kid, he sat transfixed, watching the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969. Growing up, he was a huge “Star Trek” fan, watching episodes of the show over and over. And in high school, he read the book “High Frontier” by Gerard O’Neill, the Princeton physics professor who argued that humans should not try to colonize another planet but rather live in giant space stations, a vision Bezos has espoused for years.

He founded Blue Origin in 2000 after being inspired by “October Sky,” the film based on Homer Hickam’s memoir, “Rocket Boys,” and he now calls the company “the most important work I’m doing.” He has called the fortune he has amassed from Amazon the winning “lottery ticket” that has allowed him to fund Blue Origin by investing $1 billion a year in the space company.

In 2013, he financed a mission to search the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean to find the F-1 engines used in the Saturn V rockets that powered the Apollo astronauts to the moon. Bezos then recovered the engines and has put some of the artifacts on display at the Seattle Museum of Flight.

He also had a cameo appearance in the film “Star Trek Beyond” in 2016.

“For years, I have been begging Paramount, which is owned by Viacom, to let me be in a ‘Star Trek’ movie. I was very persistent, and you can imagine the poor director who got the call, you know, ‘You have to let Bezos be in your “Star Trek” movie,’” Bezos joked, <a href="https://www.geekwire.com/2016/inside-story-jeff-bezos-star-trek-beyond/">according to an account in GeekWire</a>.

Blue Origin Bezos

Blue Origin’s crew of private citizens headed to the launchpad in preparation for their trip to the edge of space.

The four-person crew emerged from the astronaut training center in West Texas wearing blue spacesuits and boarded a van to head to the rocket that will launch them to the edge of space, often defined by the Kármán line, at 62 miles above the Earth’s surface.

The trip to the launchpad is about two miles. The trip to the edge of space should take about 11 minutes from launch to capsule landing.

The attempted feat is happening on an already historic date for spaceflight. On July 20, 1969, commander Neil Armstrong and lunar pilot Buzz Aldrin landed Apollo 11′s lunar module on the moon.

Blue Origin’s rocket will be the first to launch non-astronauts into space autonomously, while Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/07/11/richard-branson-virgin-galactic-live-updates/?itid=lk_inline_manual_111" target=_blank> jaunt just over a week ago </a>was controlled by two pilots.

The suborbital vehicle is expected to reach an altitude of about 65 miles. There, the crew members can unbuckle their seat belts and experience weightlessness for several minutes before strapping back in. The vehicle has three parachutes to slow its return, and the vehicle is designed to land safely even if only one of them works.

The rocket has completed 15 successful flight tests — with no people onboard — before today.

The mission represents a big step toward Blue Origin’s plans for operational space flights with paying passengers. The company hasn’t said when that will start, but it has two other flights planned for this year. Future flights will carry six passengers, Blue Origin says.

“This is just the beginning,” Blue Origin said in a live-stream video Tuesday morning.

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Although Richard Branson beat Jeff Bezos in the race to the edge of space earlier this month, and Elon Musk’s Space X flew people to the International Space Station last year, Bezos is still ahead in one competition: Who’s got the most money.

But for the 10 minutes or so that Bezos is flying on New Shepard, Musk will be able to call himself the wealthiest person on Earth.

Musk is still the second wealthiest person in the world, with a net worth of $178 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. That’s about $26 billion behind Bezos, whose net worth is $204 billion, according to the Bloomberg index.

And Branson? He’s No. 414, with $6.7 billion.

Jay Greene

The front gate to the Blue Origin complex in West Texas

Spaceport America is a gleaming mirage in the New Mexico desert that Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic calls the “gateway to space.”

It’s built, in typical Branson fashion, with luxury and style in mind, a symbol of the future that Virgin Galactic hopes to create as the “world’s first commercial spaceline.”

Blue Origin’s rocket ranch, some 200 miles away in the West Texas desert, is, by contrast, an austere launch site set amid dense brush and stark mountains, miles from civilization.

Launch Site One, the pad where Blue Origin’s 63-foot-tall rocket will blast off, is as modest as they come. To get to their space capsule, astronauts walk up seven flights of stairs — there’s not even an elevator.

Crew accommodations are in Airstream trailers. And before flight, the rocket is housed in the barn, a large hangar a couple miles from the launch site.

The training facility, though, has a full mock-up of the capsule, where the crew members practice getting in and out of their seats, buckling their harnesses. And there’s even a simulation of the flight, with noise replicating the sound of the engine firing.

Ahead of Blue Origin’s first human mission, reporters have been working in a large hangar on the site, outfitted with large tables and couches. On Monday, Bezos brought dinner for the assembled reporters — arroz con pollo, or chicken with rice, a family favorite, he said, while distributing the recipe.

Blue Origin Bezos Flight

Jeff Bezos is flying, of course. His brother Mark is flying, too, after Bezos invited him to come along. Mark Bezos serves on the leadership council of Robin Hood, a New York City nonprofit organization that fights poverty, and he has also <a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/mark_bezos_a_life_lesson_from_a_volunteer_firefighter?language=en#t-210573">worked as a volunteer firefighter</a> in suburban New York.

One of the seats was to go to the winner of an auction who paid an astounding $28 million for the privilege to fly on Blue Origin’s first human spaceflight mission. But the anonymous winner passed because of a scheduling conflict, Blue Origin said last week.

Instead, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/07/15/blueoriginjeffbezos28millionauctionspace/?itid=lk_inline_manual_135">Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old</a> from the Netherlands, is taking the seat and would become the youngest person ever to go to space. Daemen, whose father is the head of an investment company, had participated in the auction and was slated to go on the company’s second crewed flight before he got bumped up.

But the real star of the crew is Mary Wallace “Wally” Funk, a vivacious 82-year-old aviator who has spent nearly 20,000 hours flying all sorts of aircraft. She was the first female inspector for the Federal Aviation Administration and the first female air safety investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board.

During the early 1960s, she was also a member of the Mercury 13, a group of women chosen for a privately funded training program that mimicked what their male counterparts at NASA were doing as part of the Mercury program. Ultimately, the program was canceled, and the women never got to fly.

All the more reason Funk said she was thrilled to go with Bezos.

Bezos visited Funk at her home recently to invite her and posted the exchange on Instagram.

“We open the hatch, and you step outside,” Bezos said to her. “What’s the first thing you say?”

“I will say, ‘Honey, that’s the best thing that ever happened to me!’ ” she replied, grabbing Bezos in a vise-like hug.

Despite the age gap between its oldest and youngest members — after the flight, they’ll be the youngest and oldest people ever to have flown to space — Jeff Ashby, a former NASA astronaut who serves as Blue Origin’s chief of mission assurance, said the flight will be “very bonding for the crew as individuals.”

“I would predict the crew will be good friends for the rest of their lives because of the shared experience,” he said in an interview.

Emmy Award, 2021. Peabody Award, 2010. On teams that were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in 2005, 2010 and 2011.

The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos (PublicAffairs, April 2018)

As You Were: To War and Back with the Black Hawk Battalion of the Virginia National Guard

Colby College, B.A., American Studies

Christian Davenport covers NASA and the space industry for The Washington Post's Financial desk. He joined The Post in 2000 and has served as an editor on the Metro desk and as a reporter covering military affairs. He is the author of "The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos" (PublicAffairs, 2018).

City University of New York’s Baruch College, Bachelor's in Business Journalism

Dalvin Brown is the Innovations reporter for The Washington Post's Financial section.

Jeff Bezos, Mark Bezos, Wally Funk and Oliver Daemen reach space, return safely on Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket