Two Germans are Amazon founders of the US space company Blue Origin Jeff Bezos flown into space for a short trip. A live Internet broadcast showed the New Shepard NS-37 rocket taking off from West Texas for an eleven-minute flight and landing again eleven minutes later.
On the 16th trip of Bezos’ space tourism company. The former space engineer Hans Königsmann and the wheelchair-bound engineer from the European space agency Esa, Michaela Benthaus, are the first two Germans to take part in such a space excursion. Benthaus is also the first person to fly into space with paraplegia. Four US entrepreneurs were also on board the rocket.
The largely automated excursion took the six space tourists to an altitude of around 100 kilometers and also included a short period of weightlessness.
Critics see Blue Origin short flights as unnecessary space tourism for the super-rich
The rocket was actually supposed to take off on Thursday. However, the flight had to be canceled less than a minute before the scheduled takeoff become. The reason was “a problem with our built-in pre-flight checks,” it said.
Critics accuse Blue Origin of using its short flights into space to engage in unnecessary space tourism for the super-rich. They point primarily to the damage the flights do to the environment and climate, to the limited scientific benefit and to the elitist nature of the offer, that only very rich customers can afford.
