The stubby white spacecraft with a round tip blasted off
into clear blue skies over West Texas for a roughly 11-minute trip to just
beyond the internationally recognised boundary of space, 62 miles (100
kilometres) high.
The six-member crew hooted with glee as they unbuckled to
enjoy a few minutes of weightlessness, looking out at space through tall
windows in the capsule.
"I've never seen anything like that," one
unidentified crew member said as Blue Origin live-streamed the flight.
The capsule quickly returned to Earth for a gentle parachute
landing in the desert, kicking up a cloud of dust as it touched down.
Bezos and other company officials rushed to greet the crew
members as they emerged smiling from the capsule. The booster rocket touched
down separately and also safely.
“We had a great flight today," Blue Origin CEO Bob
Smith said in a statement.
Laura Shepard-Churchley, whose father Alan Shepard became
the first American to travel to space in 1961, flew as a guest of Blue Origin.
The company's suborbital rocket is in fact named New Shepard
in honour of the pioneering astronaut.
Michael Strahan, an American football Hall of Famer turned
TV personality, was also a guest, while there were four paying customers: space
industry executive and philanthropist Dylan Taylor, investor Evan Dick, Bess
Ventures founder Lane Bess, and Cameron Bess.
Lane and Cameron Bess became the first parent-child pair to
fly in space. Ticket prices have not been disclosed.
Alan Shepard made US history with a 15-minute suborbital
space flight on May 5, 1961, just under a month after the Soviet Union's Yuri
Gagarin became the first human in space, orbiting the planet.
Shepard, who died in 1998, went on to be the fifth of 12 men
to have set foot on the Moon.
"It's kind of fun for me to say an original Shepard
will fly on the New Shepard," Shepard-Churchley, who runs a foundation
that promotes science and raises funds for college students, said in a video
before the flight. "I'm very proud of my father's legacy."
Previous Blue Origin flights took the company's billionaire
founder Bezos as well as Star Trek actor William Shatner to space.
Bezos, who made his fortune with Amazon, envisages a future
in which humanity disperses throughout the solar system, living, and working in
giant space colonies with artificial gravity.
This, he says, would leave Earth as a pristine tourism
destination much like national parks today.
The year 2021 has been significant for the space tourism
sector, with Virgin Galactic also flying its founder Richard Branson to the
final frontier, and Elon Musk's SpaceX sending four private citizens on a
three-day orbital mission for charity.