The height of luxury is 65 miles above you. For four minutes there last month, a gaggle of six lucky space tourists — including a former party supplies tycoon, a university professor, a property developer and his wife — floated happily on Jeff Bezos’s New Shepard capsule, a spunky, workmanlike hunk of metal described variously as ‘a gumdrop shaped capsule’ and a ‘dong rocket’. It was the 20th successful launch by the Amazon founder’s $1bn-a-year Blue Origin joyride project since last July, the first not to boast a celebrity crewmember — Pete Davidson, the Saturday Night Live star feuding with Kanye West while dating his ex, Kim Kardashian, dropped out due to a scheduling conflict.
A new space race is accelerating. This time, it’s not about superpowers duking it out for supremacy but private companies ferrying wide-eyed mugs into Earth’s orbit. Last July, Richard Branson’s big, shiny Virgin Galactic space rocket plane made it 53.4 miles up to the edge of space; Musk’s balletic Falcon rockets are reusable, and reliably so, flinging heavy payloads — and people — above the atmosphere 31 times last year like a slick, sci-fi trampoline.
