On Tuesday, the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos set out to boldly go where only one other billionaire has gone before: Space, the final frontier.
“Astronaut Bezos: Happy, happy, happy,” Bezos could be heard saying over the comms on board the spacecraft.
Bezos, along with a crew that included aviation pioneer Mary Wallace “Wally” Funk, 18-year-old Dutch student Oliver Daemen and Bezos’ younger brother Mark, blasted off aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard on a journey to more than 62 miles above Van Horn, a small town in West Texas.
After experiencing a few minutes of weightlessness, the capsule touched down in the West Texas desert, returning safely to Earth.
After landing, Bezos called it the “best day ever!”
At a press conference after the flight, Bezos took the time to thank Amazon employees and customers for making the trip possible.
“I also want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer because you guys paid for all of this,” Bezos said.
Bezos told CNN that seeing Earth from the rocket was “profound,” adding that seeing the planet “drives home that point that we know theoretically, that we have to be careful with the Earth’s atmosphere.”
“It is a small little thing, and it is fragile,” Bezos said.
Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000, and the company has been testing its New Shepard capsule – named after Alan Shepard, the first American in space – for over a decade.
The capsule is fully automated, so there is no need for trained staff aboard the quick up-and-down flight, which was expected to last about 10 minutes. The rocket is more traditional, taking off vertically and consisting of a capsule and a booster module, which detached after the booster burned up its propellant fuel.
The New Shepard rocket flew toward space at three times the speed of sound, or Mach 3, before the booster separated from the capsule and returned for an upright landing. The booster landed vertically, right on target, not unlike SpaceX’s Falcon 9 vessels.
 
“Every computer on board, every battery, every sensor, every wire, every mechanism that we need for safety has one or two back ups,” Gary Lai, Blue Origin’s senior director, said in an interview with CNN about the safety of the rocket.
The Amazon founder’s flight came just days after fellow billionaire Sir Richard Branson soared to the edge of space aboard his Virgin Galactic spacecraft.
Branson took to Twitter to congratulate Bezos, the New Shepard crew and the entire Blue Origin team on a successful flight: “Impressive!”
The crew featured a number of milestones, in addition to Bezos’ record-setting trip – at 82, Funk became the oldest person in space; at 18, Daemen, whose father is the CEO of a private equity firm in the Netherlands, is now the youngest.
An anonymous bidder paid $28 million in a charity auction for Daemen’s slot on the flight initially, but bowed out due to a scheduling conflict; Daemen’s father was one of the runners up in the bidding, and the 18-year-old was initially set to be on the second New Shepard flight, according to a Blue Origin spokesperson.
Daemen called it a “dream come true” in a statement, adding: “The flight to and into space only takes 10 minutes, but I already know that these will be the most special 10 minutes of my life.”
“Wally” Funk was one of 13 female pilots who went through the same testing back in the early 1960s as NASA’s Mercury astronauts, but failed to make the cut because they were women.
For Bezos, the mission is personal: He grew up during the Apollo spaceflight era, which inspired him as a child.
“Space is something that I have been in love with since I was 5 years old,” the Amazon founder said in 2014. “I watched Neil Armstrong step onto the surface of the moon, and I guess it imprinted me.”
Bezos’ dream-come-true trip follows 15 successful test flights to space by New Shepard rockets since 2015, all of them unoccupied. If successful, Blue Origin plans two more passenger flights by year’s end.
But many have criticized the so-called “billionaire space race,” with some saying that space travel will be a luxury for the ultra-wealthy, while others have said that people like Bezos should focus on issues on Earth.
Bezos, for his part, told CNN that those critics are “largely right.”
“We have to do both,” Bezos said. “You know, 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. We have to do both.”
This mission, Bezos added, is about “building a road to space for the next generations to do amazing things there, and those amazing things will solve problems here on Earth.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
