Bezos’ Blue Origin crew lands safely after successful first human spaceflight

Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket landed safely on the ground after Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos and crew Mark Bezos, Wally Funk, and Oilver Daemen launched into space.

Video Transcript

JULIE HYMAN: We are T minus nearly five minutes to the launch. You see there on the right side of your screen that we've got the feed from Blue Origin with their director of astronaut and orbital sales Ariane Cornell, who has been narrating much of the action there on the ground in west Texas for us in the desert there.

We were just talking about it a little bit ago, but I think we should sort of put a fine point on it, sort of the differences between the different goals from a SpaceX to a Blue Origin to a Virgin Galactic. Dan Howley, for example, Virgin Galactic was more of a plane effectively taking Branson up to the edge of space. This is a more traditional rocket, and then you've got SpaceX, which is designed to make sort of further and more sustainable trips.

DAN HOWLEY: Yeah, you have SpaceX, which is basically doing it all right now. They're launching to the International Space Station. They had a winning bid for a lunar lander. Blue Origin contesting that. They wanted to be part of the lunar lander team as well, but it looks as though on the outside you have SpaceX kind of wanting to go the furthest, setting up a colony on Mars.

That's been something that Elon Musk has talked about for a long time. He has the support of NASA behind him. They do want to get to Mars down the line. The moon is set for 2024. But that's likely going to be pushed back just because the timeline is really aggressive, and it would take a lot to really hit that.

And so you have kind of Musk wanting to go furthest you would kind of think away from the Earth. You have Blue Origin obviously looking to be part of moon missions, and getting to the International Space Station, launching satellites, something that SpaceX does as well. They want to take part in contracts with the military as well as NASA. And then you have something along the lines of Virgin Galactic, which really will be tourist heavy. $250,000 per seat.

You could buy a house in some parts of the country for that, but it's not as seemingly unattainable as the multi-million dollar trips that you would get out of something like a SpaceX, $55 million for 10 days on the International Space Station, or Blue Origin for their $28 million winning seat on this particular flight. But you do get the sense that Virgin Galactic will be more of the touristy, almost thrill ride experience, very heavy on thrill, but they will be doing some experiments with astronauts. So I do think that they all are going to provide benefit, but it really does kind of go in my mind the Virgin Galactic, then Blue Origin, then SpaceX as far as advances in how far they want to go.

ADAM SHAPIRO: Julie, I'm curious, because when you hear those numbers, $28 million aboard the winning bid here, although it's the runner up at $27 million who's going, $58 million to go on SpaceX. How many of us have that kind of money lying-- I mean, I know you do, Julie, but there's a limited market--

JULIE HYMAN: Certainly.

ADAM SHAPIRO: --for space tourism, right? I mean, this is-- if your business model is space tourism, none of these companies are going to fly so to speak.

JULIE HYMAN: I'm sitting on my pile in my undisclosed location right now just outside the frame saving it up to go to space. No, certainly, if that's the proposition, but I think what's clear from all three of these guys is that there is a personal element as well as a business element. I mean, Jeff Bezos has talked extensively about how this has been a lifelong dream of his to go to space.

So as I was just reading an "Atlantic" article from a few months ago, Jeff Bezos built Blue Origin for him was the headline of the article, and there is an aspect of that for all three of these men, right? But at the same time, eventually-- I don't know how eventually, but, eventually, the cost is going to come down. And maybe it's not going to be $28 million.

Maybe as we talked about the other day, is it going to be $250,000? Is it going to be in the hundreds of thousands? It's still a small subset of the population that can afford that, but it's larger than it would be for the in the millions as it is right now.

- And there we see platform retracted down there in Van Horn, Texas. We are just about 75 seconds away from expected liftoff here. Jeff Bezos and three others aboard the New Shepard Blue Origin spacecraft, getting set to head into space in just about 60 seconds' time. And I will say countdowns are exciting. You feel the energy.

ADAM SHAPIRO: Can you imagine their hearts? I bet their hearts are pounding inside that capsule.

- Wally Funk, 82. Good for her.

- I mean--

- That's awesome.

- Oh, I was just thinking in our little jobs here when we have the countdown till we come back, and Mike counts us in, you get a little juice when he does the 4, 3, 2, 1. And imagine-- Adam, imagine sitting there waiting to see yourself sent up into space. All right, let's just take it live from Van Horn, Texas, as Jeff Bezos and the crew get ready to launch into space.

- Godspeed. First crew of New Shepard. Let's light this candle.

- T minus 16. Guidance internal. T minus 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4. Command engine start. 2, 1. We have lift off. The Shepard's cleared the tower.

- And New Shepard has cleared the tower on our way to space from our first human crew. Go, Jeff. Go, Mark. Go, Wally. Go, Oliver. You are going to space.

- [INAUDIBLE]

- Oh my goodness. Listen to the roar of the BE-3 engine. We are just about to pass through max q, maximum dynamic pressure. That's when the stresses on the vehicle are at their maximum.

- Max q.

- Max q is confirmed. Beautiful burn on that BE-3 engine. Liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen as the propellant, it's a nice-- not just clean in terms of a beautifully performing, but what comes out of it, it's steam, right? Woo. To see the glow of the engine underneath the rocket just under our shoulders and to know that we've got a crew that is going to space, it just feels different, doesn't it, Gary?

- It is totally different.

- [LAUGHS]

All right, you can follow along of course. The speedometer in the bottom left. The altimeter in the middle of the screen there. So far, appears to be a nominal flight.

All right, coming up here on MECO, main engine cutoff. That will be followed shortly by separation, and at that point after separation, we're going to let the astronauts unbuckle and take in the freedoms of zero-G. There is MECO, main engine cutoff. A beautiful shot down the New Shepard rocket. Look at that view.

Unreal. Awaiting separation here. And here we are. You can start to see. Standby. You're going to see the separation of the capsule from the booster itself.

- Woo! Oh, wow. Wow. Wow. [INAUDIBLE]

- Also you have to look out the window.

- Holy. Good god. Oh, wow.

- Woo! Woo-hoo!

- Mark, don't forget to get upside-down.

- And there we go. Our astronauts have passed the Kármán line at about 328,000 feet, continuing their ascent. You see the two vehicles there. When the speed hits zero, you know that they've hit half a G, their maximum--

- Woo-hoo!

- --altitude. And you hear they're having quite an experience.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

- All my instincts are [INAUDIBLE].

- [INAUDIBLE]

- Woo-hoo! Woo.

- [INAUDIBLE]

- God. This is fun.

- You just have to wait for it. Who wants a Skittle?

- Oh, yeah. Yeah.

- Yeah! Well done.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

- One minute warning. One minute warning.

- [INAUDIBLE]

- Can't get [INAUDIBLE].

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

- Nope, no good. Here, Jeff.

- You got one?

- Got it.

- Got it?

- Let's see if I can see the boot.

- Yeah.

- Oh, yeah.

- The little tip. I cannot--

- Oh, wow. You got to take the moment to view sometimes.

- [INAUDIBLE]

- OK, get in. Everybody, get in. Doing the roll.

- Woo!

- All right, we'll do the roll.

- Oh, fantastic. Look at this. It's dark up here.

- Oh, wow.

- 2,000 miles an hour.

- Is everybody in?

- First step, status check. Astronaut Oliver.

- Oh my word!

- Oh, wow.

- [INAUDIBLE] galore!

- Oliver, status check.

- Oh, sorry. Hello, control. Rollover status is perfect. [INAUDIBLE]

- Copy. Astronaut Wally.

- Wally. To control, Wally. [INAUDIBLE]

- Copy, Astronaut Demo.

- Astronaut Demo, [INAUDIBLE].

- Copy, Astronaut Bezos.

- Woo-hoo! Woo!

- Well, that was intense.

- Bezos to [INAUDIBLE], happy, happy, happy.

- Copy.

- Thank you again, everybody, for joining us live for our first human flight on New Shepard. So far, a nominal flight. Our booster is about to return to its landing pad. There, we see engine relights.

- Sonic boom.

- And a sonic boom. And booster touchdown.

- All right, touchdown.

- Welcome back, New Shepard.

- There it is.

- Wow.

- Blue Origin, New Shepard, up and back. Jeff Bezos and three others, including his brother, making it up into space and back over the last-- what was that, Adam? About 11 minutes? 12 minutes?

ADAM SHAPIRO: Yeah, well, that's just-- it's just the booster. They're still-- we're hearing the audio from the capsule.

- Oh, there it is.

ADAM SHAPIRO: You heard Wally Funk say-- right. It's coming back down. It goes up, and then they fall. And now they get the four minutes to barf because there's essentially no gravity. But can we just acknowledge how-- I don't think we can use the F word, but it is F-word cool what we're witnessing here. I mean, this is Buck Rogers watching the booster land on its own, and they've now done that 16 times successfully. And here comes New Shepard.

- Julie pointed this out. Were they taking a selfie up there?

JULIE HYMAN: They seemed to be, right? You could hear. We just had the audio, but, obviously, you heard a lot of woo-hoo on board with the people who were up there, obviously having a good time. And then someone said, is everybody-- everybody get in, everybody get in, which I took to mean that they were taking a class photo so to speak while they were up there.

Part of this is the cool factor. Obviously, it's fricking cool like Adam was just saying. Part of it, let's be honest, is also an ad for the product, which we also saw with Virgin Galactic as we saw Richard Branson up there talking and people floating along beside and behind him that there is that aspect to it as well. I mean, even Myles was tempted when he saw the Branson voyage to space, right?

And there is an aspect of that, that you look at this and there's an aspirational aspect. How cool is this? How cool would it be to go up and do this? And even if I don't want to spend the pile of money that I'm sitting on here to go up there, certainly, this will inspire people either who have money or future actual astronauts to want to do this.

- Yeah, Julie, a much more challenging decision for you than me, considering you do have the funding to do this, whereas I don't, so that decision's certainly taken out of my hands. But I'll say with all these kind of space ventures-- and I got it too when-- I forget the guy's name-- the guy who jumped-- the Red Bull guy. He jumped out of a plane, jumped from space down to Earth. It's like that moment when you're that high above the Earth is when for me-- like, I get it.

You look back down, and you're like, yeah, OK, that would be pretty cool. When they're taking off, all you're thinking-- all I'm thinking is what's going to go wrong? But once you get up that high-- and I know that landing is usually more dangerous. It's more dangerous in a plane. Probably more dangerous here. But once you get up there, it seems like, OK, that for me, Adam, that does it.

ADAM SHAPIRO: I'm just watching this, and I'm just amazed. I mean, this capsule is going to slow down to one mile per hour before it actually touches planet Earth. But for me being a Cold War era child, I'm thinking about what I said earlier. The competition with, say, now the Chinese. The Russians are out of it. But the Chinese, I mean, that is so 20th century. OK, it hit at 16 miles per hour, but, still, they landed safely. And look what we're doing, and it's all private.

- No, I am amazed. I'm just looking at Virgin Galactic shares. I've been watching this all morning long. Now you're seeing the sell off accelerate a little bit premarket in Virgin Galactic shares, and I'm surprised. I mean, this is a big-- another validation in the space travel industry. I would have thought the stock would have taken off. That's just not the case. It's just an amazing morning.