Opening the promise of space to all, Jeff Bezos, the world's richest person, is set to embark on his first space trip on Tuesday from Launch Site One in West Texas.
57-year-old Bezos will ride his own rocket to outer space just nine days after rival Richard Branson became the first billionaire astronaut.
Bezos, the founder, former CEO, and executive chairman of Amazon, is due to fly from a desert site in West Texas on an 11-minute voyage to the edge of space aboard his company Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket.
"Astronauts have completed training and are a go for launch," tweeted Blue Origin.
Having completed all preparations for the lauch Blue Origin added that safety is and will always be our top priority.
The first human flight on Tuesday will be the 16th flight in #NewShepard’s history.
Bezos will be joined in the flight by three others, including his brother Mark Bezos. A seat on Blue Origin's New Shepard craft was auctioned off at $28 million in June.
"I am excited, but not anxious. We'll see how I feel when I'm strapped into my seat," Bezos said in an interview with Fox
Business Network on Monday. "... We're ready. The vehicle's ready. This team is amazing. I feel very good about it. And I think my fellow crewmates feel good about it, too."
New Shepard, manufactured by Blue Origin for space tourism, is a fully reusable rocket. It has made 15 uncrewed test launches so far.
New Shepard can carry passengers into suborbital space inside of a crew capsule having six large observation windows, one per seat. During the flight, the crew will gaze back at the Earth's curvature through what Blue Origin calls the largest windows ever used in space travel. They also get a chance to unbuckle for a few minutes to exprience weightlessness.Then, the capsule falls back to Earth under parachutes, using a last-minute retro-thrust system that expels a "pillow of air" for a soft landing at 1.6 km/h in the Texas desert.
The reusable booster is due to return to the launch pad using drag brakes and ring and wedge fins for stabilisation.
The rocket is 18.3-meters-tall and fully autonomous rocket-and-capsule combo that cannot be piloted from inside the spacecraft. It is completely computer-flown and will have none of Blue Origin's staff astronauts. The liquefied natural gas, BE-4, used in New Shepard was developed at Blue Origin's headquarters in Kent, Wash., with tests conducted at Bezos' West Texas ranch.
In contrast, Virgin Galactic used a space plane with a pair of pilots onboard. New Shepard is set to hurtle at speeds upwards of 3,540 km per hour to an altitude of about 100 km, the so-called Krmn line set by an international aeronautics body as defining the boundary between Earth's atmosphere and space.
Barring technical or weather-related delays, New Shepard is due to blast off around 8 a.m. CDT (1300 GMT) from Blue Origin's
Launch Site One facility some 20 miles (32 km) outside the rural Texas town of Van Horn.
The launch will come live on http://BlueOrigin.com, starting at 6:30 am CDT / 11:30 UTC. #NSFirstHumanFlight.
