Blue Origin and Crewmates are Ready to take of with a Non-Pilot Rocket
British rival Richard Branson may have overtaken Jeff Bezos in the matter of going to space, but next week he is going to make history when the world's first pilotless plane will fly. When former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos sets out to touch the edge of space on Tuesday, his company Blue Origin's New Shepard aircraft will set another milestone in the field of space tourism. There will be four crew members in the aircraft but none of them will be the pilot.
The 11-minute-long flight will be accompanied by Jeff Bezos, his brother and industrialist Mark Bezos, a former volley funk over 80 years old and a teenager. The 60-foot-high New Shepard is a fully automated rocket plane that cannot be piloted from inside. So the crew is all civilians and no Blue Origin staff or astronauts will be on board.
Blue Origin astronaut Nicholas Patrick, who worked with NASA, will also not board the plane. Bezos says that after seeing the Earth from space, your relationship with this planet changes, your relationship with humanity changes. Space industry analyst Teal Group Marco Kaisers says this will be the first time a fully automated rocket will fly without a pilot.
Only last week, Richard Branson traveled to space in a rocket plane of his company Virgin Galactic. His rocket took off from the airport in New Mexico on Sunday and traveled for more than an hour. Apart from two pilots in that plane, an instructor training the astronauts and the chief engineer of this mission were also involved.
The New Shepard is also different from Virgin Galactic in terms of flight mode. Virgin Galactic was a rocket-powered spacecraft that was launched into the air by a carrier plane. New Shepard will stand up like a rocket and will fly straight. Like Virgin Galactic, New Shepard will not enter Earth's orbit, but will carry passengers to an altitude of about 100 kilometers. From there the capsule will return with the help of parachute. Virgin Galactic went to an altitude of 86 km.
Blue Origin took two decades to build. Bezos founded this company in 2000. Several years ago the company decided that it would use pilotless aircraft for its operations. According to a person familiar with the company's thinking, their math is very simple. "If you put a system in place so that you don't need a pilot or a co-pilot, then obviously you will be able to get more passengers who will pay for the ticket," he says.
Passengers can travel in New Shepard. The passengers will be given two days of training before the space journey. Two employees have been entrusted with the responsibility of putting these passengers on the plane, who will prepare the passengers for all kinds of situations. Caesars says, "It's like riding a swing at an amusement park. You just trust that everything has been checked and is fine. You just sit back and enjoy the ride."