[imagesource: Getty Images]
So we briefly got rid of the world’s richest person yesterday.
I saw that mentioned somewhere and have committed to referring to Jeff Bezos’ flight to space with that phrase from now on.
He took along with him three crew members – his brother Mark, 82-year-old female aeronautics pioneer Wally Funk, who became the oldest person to ever go to space, and 18-year-old Oliver Daemen, who became the youngest.
They achieved what they set out to do aboard the New Shepard rocket that took them above the Kármán Line, considered to be the edge of space, for a full 10-minute flight before safely returning to Earth.
At zero gravity the crew had the most Western fun possible within four minutes, with several cries of “Woo!” and “Woo-hoo!” before they started playing with orange ping pong balls and tossing Skittles into each other’s mouths.
NPR puts it nicely:
On July 20, 1969, astronaut Neil Armstrong uttered his famous line on the moon: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
And 52 years later to the day, Jeff Bezos or his brother (from the audio, it’s unclear which of the two) asked as their crew hit zero gravity, “Who wants a Skittle?”
Meanwhile, Funk was enjoying the view:
“Oh, Jeff, look at those — it’s dark up here!” she said during the flight.
Likely looking out the window at Earth below, she said, “Oh my word, look at the world!”
Bezos seemed chuffed:
“There’s a very happy group of people on this capsule,” Bezos told ground control, following up with a status update: “Happy, happy, happy.”
You can watch it all unfold a good 35 minutes into this video:
It’s impossible not to love Funk’s enthusiasm.
Congrats to Daemen, whose father paid $28 million so that he could catch a Skittle in his mouth travel to space after the previous auction winner pulled out due to a “scheduling conflict”.
This short video sums up the whole flight rather nicely:
At zero gravity, Bezos also recognised Earth’s fragility, per New York Post:
“The atmosphere is so big. But when you get up above it, you see it’s this tiny little fragile thing,” he said.
“That’s very profound. It’s one thing to recognize that intellectually. It’s another thing to actually see with your own eyes how fragile it really is and that was amazing,” he continued.
On that note, CNN reports that Bezos also discussed a bit about the climate crisis after his space trip:
“We really have to move heavy industry and polluting industry off Earth,” Bezos said.
He said he wants to make “dirty polluting stuff” like “chips and microchips” in space, but he added that the timeline might span over multiple decades. “It won’t be done in my lifetime,” said Bezos, who is 57 years old.
“We have lots of problems on Earth,” he said, specifically pointing to poverty, hunger, climate disasters and pollution. “We have to work on the here and now and and we have to look to the future.”
That sounds alright, but what about the intense pollution that space travel itself will cause?
Granted, Bezos did also use his billions to start the Bezos Earth Fund, which focuses on the transition to clean energy and equitable access to healthy air, water, and land.
But quite frankly, this small amount of work won’t be enough to offset the damage that is already rife.
With record-breaking heatwaves hitting the West, floods in Germany and Australia and China, and leaders umming and ahhing while this all becomes the new norm, we have a long road ahead.
