Billionaire Jeff Bezos will blast into space on Tuesday, in the first crewed flight of his rocket ship, New Shepard.
He will be accompanied by Mark Bezos, his brother, Wally Funk, an 82-year-old pioneer of the space race, and an 18-year-old paying customer.
They will travel in a capsule with the biggest windows flown into space, offering stunning views of the Earth.
New Shepard, built by Bezos’ company Blue Origin, is designed to serve the burgeoning market for space tourism.
“I’m excited. People keep asking me if I’m nervous. I’m not really nervous, I’m curious. I want to know what we’re going to learn,” Bezos said in an interview with CBS News.
“We’ve been training. This vehicle’s ready, this crew is ready, this team is amazing. We just feel really good about it.”
The capsule, containing the Bezos brothers, Funk and student Oliver Daemen, separates from its booster around 76km (250,000ft) up. The booster lands about 2 miles from the launch pad, while the capsule continues upwards to a maximum altitude of around 106km (350,000ft).
“We’re in zero-g for around four minutes, and we get to get out of our seats, unstrap, float around, look at the thin limb of the Earth’s atmosphere,” Bezos told CBS News.
“People who have been up – astronauts – say that when they do that, they can see that the Earth is so fragile.
The launch is the latest salvo in what has been dubbed the “billionaire space race”. It comes just nine days after Bezos’ space tourism rival, Sir Richard Branson, flew high above the Earth on his Virgin Galactic space plane on 11 July.
With a net worth of around $200bn, Bezos is the world’s richest man. The 57-year-old recently resigned as chief executive of Amazon, the e-commerce giant he founded, to focus on special company initiatives and his other ventures such as Blue Origin.
