Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who ran for president in 2020, publicly criticized Bezos "This underscores the criticism of commercial space as 'rich boys and their toys.'" (Berger's book " Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX" was published in March.) "Bezos has received some serious backlash in the last month, both because he is the richest person in the world, and his first real public spaceflight act was to get on a ship and rocket into space for his own gratification," author and senior space editor at Ars Technica Eric Berger told. Leading up to these suborbital flights and afterward, the public discourse on social media and even in traditional media and broadcast news networks has leaned heavily into discussing whether it is positive progress to see billionaires ride to space in the rockets their companies have built. That's raised questions about who ultimately is benefiting." (Bezos bought The Washington Post in 2013.) "While these entrepreneurs are starting to take private citizens, the passengers so far have been, by and large, extremely wealthy. "There is also a fair amount of backlash to the flights, and the industry more broadly, about the enormous costs of these flights," Christian Davenport, author of " The Space Barons" and space reporter for The Washington Post, told. But the fact that it was a crewed launch (with a crew that included Bezos himself), and its temporal proximity to Virgin Galactic's crewed suborbital launch with its founder Richard Branson just over a week beforehand, shone a brighter light on the company. The July flight certainly didn't mark the first time that Blue Origin got major media attention. It was its first trip to space with passengers, a milestone that signified a step toward a future with regular launches of crews of paying customers, including space tourists.īut this milestone, which put Blue Origin into the spotlight, also seems to have been a turning point for how the public views Bezos' company. Since Bezos founded the company in 2000, Blue Origin and its hardworking engineers and employees have been making progress with the company's many space technologies, including its New Shepard vehicle that lofted a crew of four passengers to space and back this July, and its upcoming New Glenn orbital vehicle.īlue Origin's latest launch, which carried Bezos along with his brother Mark, 18-year-old Dutch student Oliver Daemen and pioneering aviator Wally Funk to and from suborbital space aboard New Shepard, was a turning point for the company. However, amidst a booming space sector, one company has drawn a majority of the ire - Blue Origin. Over the past few months, commercial spaceflight has launched into overdrive as companies like Axiom planned crewed missions to the International Space Station, SpaceX won NASA's Human Landing System (HLS) contract to build a moon lander and Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic successfully completed crewed suborbital flights with the companies' respective billionaire founders on board. So why does Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin seem to be in the hot seat?ĭespite a summer of success, recent competition and some controversial tweets - including some misleading infographics - have left many who follow the space industry feeling less than supportive of Jeff Bezos and his space company. These days, it feels as though billionaire-backed space companies are launching off Earth all the time.
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