Jeff Bezos, the world's richest man, has succeeded in realizing his dream of going into space, aboard his company's first manned flight, Blue Origin, giving an extra boost to the fledgling space tourism industry.
The "New Shepard" missile, carrying a capsule with the four passengers, was launched minutes later than the original launch date, from an isolated location in the West Texas desert, 40 kilometers from the city of Van Horn.
Along with Jeff Bezos, his brother Mark, 82-year-old aviation pioneer Wally Funk, and Blue Origin's first customer, 18-year-old Dutchman Oliver Damon, made the latter two of the oldest and youngest astronauts ever.
The rocket ship "New Shepard" was launched into space at a speed exceeding three times the speed of sound, using an engine running on liquid hydrogen and oxygen, that is, without carbon emissions. Then the capsule separated from the missile.
The new astronauts spent a few minutes at an altitude of 107 km, beyond the Karman Line (100 km altitude), which is internationally recognized as the boundary between the Earth and space spheres.
The space capsule was designed with large windows which occupy a third of the cabin space allowing the astronauts to see stunning views of Earth. The astronauts were able to contemplate the planet from space through these large windows.
After the capsule reached its maximum altitude of about 106 kilometers (350,000 feet), it began descending on its return journey. The capsule descended in free fall before deploying three huge parachutes to land smoothly in the desert after a flight of about ten minutes.
Jeffrey Preston Bezos is an American business magnate, media proprietor, investor, and commercial astronaut. Bezos is the founder and executive chairman of Amazon, having previously served as chairman, president and CEO of the company. With a net worth of more than $200 billion as of June 2021, he is the richest person in the world according to both Forbes and Bloomberg's Billionaires Index.
Jeff Bezos was born on January 12, 1964 to his mother, Jacklyn Gise and his father, Ted Jorgensen, and his family had an extensive property in Texas that they inherited from his maternal grandparents.
His mother later married a Cuban immigrant named Miguel Bezos who was studying at the University of Albuquerque and who adopted Jeff. The family moved to Houston, Texas where the father worked as an engineer for Exxon while Jeff studied at River Oaks Elementary School from fourth to sixth grades. When he was in high school, he started his first work experience through the Dream Institute, an educational summer camp for young students in grades four to six, during which time he graduated from high school with top grades.
Blue Origin Sees Clear Skies for Inaugural Space Flight by Bezos and Crewmates
Bezos graduated from Princeton University in 1986. He holds a degree in electrical engineering and computer science. He worked on Wall Street in a variety of related fields from 1986 to early 1994.
Jeff Bezos married MacKenzie Tuttle in 1993, whom he met while working at D.E. Shaw. In January 2019, he the couple divorced after 25 years of marriage. Bezos lives with his four children in Seattle and is involved in many charitable causes.
Bezos founded Amazon in late 1994, on a cross-country road trip from New York City to Seattle. The company began as an online bookstore and has since expanded to a wide variety of other e-commerce products and services, including video and audio streaming, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence. It is currently the world's largest online sales company, the largest Internet Company by revenue, and the world's largest provider of virtual assistants and cloud infrastructure services through its Amazon Web Services branch.
In 1999, Jeff Bezos was chosen as "Person of the Year" by Time magazine, a title that defines the year and recognizes a person who has shaped the world.
In 2010, Amazon signed an agreement with Wylie to give it digital rights to the works of many authors, which greatly increased the site's profits, sales, and thus the authors' profits, despite the objection of some traditional publishing houses.
On August 5, 2013, Jeff Bezos bought the prestigious Washington Post and all of its organizations for Amazon for $250 million, ending the Graham family's control of the organization after more than four decades.
In December 2013, Jeff revealed an Amazon Prime Air pilot initiative that would use small drones to carry goods to customers no more than ten miles from the company's branches.
According to 2016 statistics in The Richest, Jeff Bezos' fortune is about $63.6 billion, and Amazon is one of the most popular e-commerce sites in the world and number one when it comes to buying books online.
In November 2017, Jeff Bezos' fortune reached $100 billion, surpassing his friend Bill Gates and he was ranked by Harvard Business Review as the second best CEO in the world.
It is expected that he will be one of the first to hold the title of "Trillionaire" in the world in 2040.
One of His Famous Quotes is: “A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.”
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