Jeff Bezos, World's Richest Man, Flies To Outer Space After Richard Branson

Jeff Bezos, world's richest man, flies to outer space, beaten in the race by British businessman Richard Branson by nine days, Reuters reported.

The Bezos spacecraft New Shepard ignited its BE-3 engines for liftoff from Blue Origin's Launch Site One facility about 20 miles (32 km) outside the rural town of Van Horn, Texas flying about 66.5 miles (107 km) above the planet's surface. There were generally clear skies with a few patchy clouds on a cool morning for the launch.

The 57-year-old American billionaire flew on a voyage lasting about 10 minutes and 20 seconds to the edge of space, nine days after Briton Richard Branson was aboard his competing space tourism company Virgin Galactic's successful inaugural suborbital flight from New Mexico.

Reporting for Yahoo Finance, Thomas Hum said Jeff Bezos was joined in the flight by his brother Mark Bezos, Wally Funk, 82, and Oliver Daemen, 18.

“In the past decade, both publicly traded and private aerospace firms have risen into prominence with aspirations of commercializing the final frontier. These companies are ushering in a new era of space exploration and travel — one that is catalyzed by free-market competition. Companies like Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin, along with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, are looking to make space exploration more affordable and accessible, as well as advance the progress of the human race,” Hum reported.

“We are really just on the cusp of seeing the activity of commercial human space flight,” Commercial Spaceflight Federation President Karina Drees told Yahoo Finance Live. “Future generations are going to look at this moment as a pivotal moment for humanity when it comes to the expansion into space.”

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