As of Tuesday morning, nearly 165,000 people have signed a petition to keep former Amazon CEO and current Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, the world’s wealthiest man, in space.
Bezos went up in the sky on Tuesday for an eleven-minute flight more than 60 miles above earth aboard the New Shepard, the rocket ship made by his space company, Blue Origin. “Riding alongside the multibillionaire were Bezos’ brother, Mark Bezos; Wally Funk, an 82-year-old pilot and one of the ‘Mercury 13’ women who trained to go to space in the 20th century but never got to fly; and an 18-year old recent high school graduate named Oliver Daemen who was Blue Origin’s first paying customer and whose father, an investor, purchased his ticket,” CNN reported.
The petition, titled, “Do not allow Jeff Bezos to return to Earth,” stated, “Billionaires should not exist…on earth, or in space, but should they decide the latter, they should stay there.”
Reservations on the New Shepard had to be won in an auction; Blue Origin might fly two more New Shepard passenger flights this year. 7,600 people from 159 countries participated in the auction.
Blue Origin stated in a press release:
Blue Origin was founded by Jeff Bezos with the vision of enabling a future where millions of people are living and working in space to benefit Earth. To preserve Earth, Blue Origin believes that humanity will need to expand, explore, find new energy and material resources, and move industries that stress Earth into space. Blue Origin is working on this today by developing partially and fully reusable launch vehicles that are safe, low cost, and serve the needs of all civil, commercial, and defense customers.
Responding to criticism of his flight, Bezos told CNN’s Rachel Crane: “They are largely right. We have to do both. We have lots of problems here and now on Earth and we need to work on those, and we always need to look to the future. We’ve always done that as a species, as a civilization.”
Richard Branson, billionaire founder of the Virgin Group, who earlier this month rode his Virgin Galactic rocket plane 53 miles above New Mexico, congratulated Bezos after the flight, tweeting, “Well done @blueorigin,@jeffbezos, Mark, Wally, and Oliver. Impressive! Very best to all the crew from me and all the team at @virgingalactic.”
Well done @blueorigin, @jeffbezos, Mark, Wally and Oliver. Impressive! Very best to all the crew from me and all the team at @virgingalactic
— Richard Branson (@richardbranson) July 20, 2021
Branson said after he landed that the trip was the “experience of a lifetime. … I have dreamt of this moment since I was a kid, but honestly nothing can prepare you for the view of Earth from space. The whole thing was just magical.”
The National Environmental Satellite Data and Information Service explains that Bezos and Branson would only reach space if they went as much as 60 miles up:
A common definition of space is known as the Kármán Line, an imaginary boundary 100 kilometers (62 miles) above mean sea level. In theory, once this 100 km line is crossed, the atmosphere becomes too thin to provide enough lift for conventional aircraft to maintain flight. At this altitude, a conventional plane would need to reach orbital velocity or risk falling back to Earth.
The world governing body for aeronautic and astronautic records, the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI), and many other organizations use the Kármán Line as a way of determining when space flight has been achieved.