![]() My last time here, I viewed a Blue Origin launch (albeit one where the only passenger was a test dummy named Mannequin Skywalker), so my own bucket list has that box checked already. It’s my third time to this small desert town, which is filling up past its limited capacity for what everyone says will be a historic launch. I’m writing this from the rural West Texas town of Van Horn, which according to the road sign on Interstate 10, is home to 2,500 souls. The other two seats on this New Shepard mission-the name Blue Origin gives to its suborbital rocket-will be empty on this flight, a surprising logistical anomaly for a businessman whose algorithms pack thousands of trucks each day to maximize every inch of space. Accompanying him will be his brother, Mark Wally Funk, an 82-year-old female aviation pioneer and an 18-year-old paying customer. At 8 am, the world’s richest man is going to space. This is what Jeff Bezos himself will do tomorrow, at around 7:36 am Central Time, after climbing seven flights of steps to enter the capsule on top of a New Shepard rocket. And though you’d think it wasn’t necessary for an 11-minute journey, each passenger will get their own in-flight entertainment screen, which, Bezos told me, will show a much cooler version of the AirShow you get on an airline, with metrics on altitude, speed, and g-forces, as well as live views from various cameras on the capsule. Inside there were six seats, looking like pricey gaming chairs, arranged along the circumference of the cone-shaped capsule. I hardly had to squeeze to pass through the sizable hatch. We were standing by the hatch of one of two crew capsules on site, which he invited me to enter. It was the summer of 2018, and he was showing me around the Blue Origin factory in Kent, Washington, where the rockets and the crew capsule for Bezos’ private space company are manufactured. “You can go ahead and poke your head in,” Jeff Bezos told me.
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