Apart from being the world’s richest man and running the world’s largest e-commerce business, Jeff Bezos also dedicates his time to his space tourism ambitions via Blue Origin, his private spaceflight company. Funded by the Bezos’s personal fortune, Blue Origin plans to utilise its reusable New Shepard Crew Capsule 2.0 to have tourists going into space by early 2019.
The suborbital spacecraft was successfully tested on December 12 in West Texas.
Crucially, the capsule, built to seat six passengers, wasn’t sent up empty. It had a single occupant, named Mannequin Skywalker, a cleverly named test dummy visible in the video above. The capsule features the largest windows on such a craft, the views through which can be seen in the video.
Skywalker doesn’t seem to be having much fun on the ride, though. No matter, said Bezos.
Bezos also took the opportunity to introduce to the world Blue Origin’s landing pad bot, called (of course) “Blue2D2”.
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