Congratulations to Bezos and company

It looks like it was quite a ride. Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin capsule soared past the 100 km mark, which is the closest thing we have to a definition of space. (It surprises most people that there's no international agreement setting the boundary for space. The U.S. Air Force awarded astronaut wings to two pilots who passed the 50-mile mark in the X-15 rocket plane in the 60s. The Karman line at 100km (62 miles) is the most commonly used definition but appears nowhere in law, national or international.)  

It's interesting Bezos was on the first crewed flight of his capsule. Of course he wanted to be, and his company built it, but it was risking the CEO and thus the venture, as did Branson's flight.  In Robert Heinlein's novel of the first private space flight, The Man Who Sold the Moon, D.D. Harriman's business partners resorted to out-and-out blackmail to keep him from risking his life on only the second flight of his spaceship. 

The only thing that would have made the flight cooler is for Bezos to have carried an Amazon package addressed to one of the ground crew and tossed it out the hatch when he landed.

There's a lot of critcism about billionaire "joyrides," but Bezos and Branson both think they can make money on space tourism flights, creating a new industry and supporting jobs and stockholders.  Beszos especially sees this as one aspect of a much larger venture: Blue Origin is competing with SpaceX. Boeing, and Lockheed Martin for contracts to launch government and commercial satellites into orbit. It's also fair to point out this money was raised from, in addition to sales of other things at Amazon and Virgin, investors whobought stock in Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic who hoped to make money from space flight.  A big chunk of the budget for these programs simply would not exist to give to charity.  Whether the two companies could do better with their support of human causes (and their employees) is aside from the point of this post.

A note on the passengers, or tourists, or astronauts (there's no official definition of "astronaut," either).  The flight carried the oldest and youngest people ever to reach space. Of special interest is "Wally" Funk, 82. The veteran pilot is one of the 13 women who, some 60 years ago, volunteeered to take the medical tests a private clinic had used to help select the Mercury astronauts under contract to NASA.   

As readers know, I write space history and want it to be correcct.  The tests at the Loveland Clinic were a privately run/funded experiment, and NASA had zero conenction to them.  The networks covering this flight harped endlessly on the "Mercury 13 astronauts" who were kept out of space when their program was canceled due to sexism.  That's incredibly sloppy journalism.  With all respect to Funk (and she deserves a lot of it),  the "Mercury 13 program" is a modern media myth. It simply never existed. Stephanie Nolen's award-winning book Promised the Moon explores every aspect of this and the debate aurrounding women astronauts.  

So let's see where this new ride takes us.