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Tomorrow morning, the world's richest man will be accompanied by three selected passengers on a rocket to throw himself to the edge of space to perform the mission of saving the world.

Jeff Bezos has been waiting for this moment since he founded Blue Origin in 1999. A few years later, he will go public and make a fortune on Amazon, the e-commerce company that will change the world. Blue Origin aims to solve Bezos’ long-term obsession with the future of human space. This obsession began in the childhood of NASA’s Apollo era and continued in Princeton, where he was inspired by the human space habitat theorist Gerald O'Neill's influence. Bezos believes that the future of human civilization is moving heavy industry and energy production away from the earth.

It took a long time for Blue Origin to develop from an organization that invited experts to participate in a space-themed barbecue to a company that actually developed space hardware. But with the debut of the new Shepard rocket in 2015, Blue’s engineers achieved a major success: an aircraft capable of carrying six passengers, flying about 100 kilometers (62 miles), but more importantly, it can Return safely to reuse again and again. It is seen as the first step towards something bigger, and it is also an ideal means of transportation on luxury tourist flights.

Both Bezos and his space rival Elon Musk believe that the key to doing more outside the Earth’s atmosphere is to reduce the cost of getting there. And both parties agree that the construction of reusable spacecraft is the way to achieve this goal. The New Shepard won the prestigious Collier Trophy in 2016, in recognition of America's greatest aviation achievement that year, when the same car was flown five times.

Then nothing happened. Although Musk’s SpaceX operates reusable aircraft-the Falcon 9 rocket and the Dragon crew cabin-transporting American astronauts to the International Space Station, which is an order of magnitude more difficult than bringing them to the edge of space, but the new The Shepard continues to fly once or twice a year. Although it plans to start selling tickets in 2019, its experiments require a few minutes of almost weightlessness under microgravity, but no one participated. Blue Origin declined to disclose what it was testing, nor did it disclose information about the vehicle. But the two successful flights in January and April this year clearly answered any lingering questions.

Blue Origin CEO Bob Smith said at the pre-flight press conference: "Our plan has always been to perform those...back-to-back flights in what we call a stable configuration." "We go from there. Both places had a clean flight, and we said we were ready and we could fly the astronauts."

The launch of New Shepard will take place in Van Horn, Texas, about a two-hour drive south of El Paso. Blue Origin has established an extensive testing facility there, away from densely populated areas, and is also home to its space tourism business. The vehicle was named after Alan Shepard, who was the first American to reach space in 1961, because it replicated an early short visit to the vacuum beyond Earth.

There, the new Shepard will be ready to launch. The vehicle is approximately 60 feet (18 meters) tall and includes a rocket booster and a space capsule. At 8:30 am Eastern Time, four astronauts in the crew will board the launch tower and climb into the space capsule, tying themselves to specially designed seats. That was the beginning and the end of their activities; as Smith said, “This is an autonomous car, and the crew is really powerless.” There is nothing about the safety of space tourism except for regulations designed to protect the public from the effects of rocket explosions. Government regulations.

At 9 am, New Shepard's rocket engine will ignite, burning a mixture of liquid hydrogen and oxygen for nearly two minutes. The rocket will accelerate beyond the speed of sound.

When the aircraft approaches the 100-kilometer peak of its trajectory, the capsule will separate from the booster below. Then the booster flew back to the launch site and landed vertically, just like a spacecraft in a science fiction movie. The capsule will continue to move along a parabolic trajectory and hang in space for a few minutes. By then, passengers will experience microgravity and be able to unfasten their seat belts from their seats, float for a few minutes, and watch the planet below for the first time. They then need to buckle their seat belts before the capsule descends, use a parachute, and use small thrusters to provide a soft landing in the Texas desert a few seconds before landing.

The entire experience only takes about 11 minutes.

Another suborbital space company, Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic performed a similar stunt last week: Its aircraft is a rocket plane launched from the bottom of a jetliner, before gliding back to Earth. Also launched to the edge of space. Blue Origin executives believe that their experience is better, partly because Virgin Galactic's aircraft can only reach an altitude of 53.5 miles (86 kilometers), which is about 10 miles lower than New Shepard. Both heights are considered by different organizations to be the boundary between the atmosphere and space; from a physical science point of view, recent studies have shown that 80 kilometers (50 miles) is the most accurate line to draw.

You may be familiar with Bezos himself. The Amazon billionaire, owner and philanthropist of the Washington Post is very happy to be here and realize his five-year-old dream, watching Apollo astronauts land on the moon. (By the way, this is the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission.)

The first passenger announced by Blue Origin was Bezos' brother Mark, an advertising supervisor and volunteer firefighter. Bezos invited his brother to join his mission in an emotional Instagram post. This undoubtedly highlights Blue Origin's confidence in the safety of its vehicles.

The second passenger announced was the 82-year-old Wally Funk, a lifelong pilot. At the beginning of the space program, she participated in a project designed to prove that women can pass with NASA male astronauts. The same rigorous test plan. Although these women are comparable to their official counterparts, NASA did not allow female astronauts to fly until 1983. Bezos invited Fink to join their crew and eventually reached space, becoming the oldest person in the process.

Finally, Blue Origin initiated a month-long auction process to find the vehicle's first paying passenger. This process resulted in a winning bid of $28 million, and the proceeds will be donated to aerospace charities sponsored by Blue. However, according to a Blue Origin spokesperson, the identity of the winning bidder has not been disclosed and withdrew at the last minute due to schedule conflicts. Instead, the 18-year-old Dutch student Oliver Day, the runner-up at the auction, the son of hedge fund investor Jos Demen, took his seat and became the youngest person in space.

Although it's hard to believe Blue's story about scheduling conflicts, the sudden change did force the company to be more transparent about its auctions. It said that about 7,500 people participated and confirmed that it originally planned to make a second flight at the gate, which is not expected to be earlier than late September.

"What a wonderful story it provides us," Blue's astronaut sales director Ariane Cornell said this week. "Wally Funk will be the oldest person ever to fly into space at the age of 82, and Oliver will become the youngest person ever to fly into space at the age of 18."

The strong opposition to space tourism at these prices is already visible in the media, and this shouldn’t surprise anyone: Compared with the problems on Earth, space exploration is always difficult to sell, coupled with the super-rich and their luxury hobbies, Created a relaxing environment for popular shots.

From Blue's point of view, luxury goods always enter any transportation project before the public. This is especially true in the automotive and aviation industries. Bezos said in 2017: "It turns out that entertainment is the driving force of technology, and then these technologies become very practical and practical in other ways. Even in the early days of the aviation industry, one of the first uses of the first aircraft was When the barn storms, they will walk around and land on the farm to sell tickets."

You will notice that today's barn storm is not a big business, no one is sure how deep the space tourism market of this nature will be. If there is enough interest and competition in Virgin Galactic, it is conceivable that the price will drop to the point where only high-income professionals can get these experiences, rather than the wealthy of the dynasty. But compared to the billionaires who paid for real space travel, you can also see that this is just a novelty, such as the travel sold by Axiom Space on SpaceX’s Dragon capsule.

Operating New Shepard can help spread the space experience, but Bezos provides a more practical analogy: "The GPUs now used for machine learning and deep learning are actually invented by Nvidia for video games... The entertainment industry is also So. It can often become a driving force for technology and then be reused."

Regardless of whether space tourism is a booming business, Bezos believes that this is a key first step in developing technology that can realize his greater ambitions beyond Earth.

For Blue, New Shepard has always been a test bed. The software and aerodynamic controls that make New Shepard reusable have been extended to New Glenn, and the company is developing a larger orbital rocket to compete with SpaceX in launching satellites and astronauts.

Perhaps the most important is the development of Blue's BE-3 rocket engine. The rocket engine has always been the most expensive and difficult part of spacecraft design, because it is the place to solve the basic problem of entering space: engineers need to control and guide huge forces to get rid of gravity. Making the engine reusable and reliable is not easy.

Now, Blue has used this knowledge to build new engines for New Glenn and the company's proposed lunar lander carrying NASA astronauts. Although New Shepard's funding mainly comes from Bezos' wealth, the US government has contributed money to the development of these new cars because it can imagine buying them for its own purposes. Blue Origin’s engines will also power new rockets designed by Lockheed Martin and Boeing for the US military.

For Bezos, this has been a long game. Blue Origin is named after the earth, which Bezos believes is the "best planet" and needs protection. He believes that in the long-term future of mankind, mankind will have to seek energy from outside the earth to avoid stagnation of civilization. "The earth is no longer big," Bezos said in 2019. "Humans are big."

For Bezos, this is the vision set by his great-grandsons. He believes that his job is to seed a new industry in shaping his Internet age model, where space entrepreneurs can innovate without the support of government agencies or large contractors. In his view, the first manned flight on the New Shepard was just a small step towards a bigger leap.

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