- Blue Origin was founded by third richest man in the world
- Katy Perry became the first artist to sing in space
- Who are Blue Origin’s rivals in the race to space?
Katy Perry blasted off to space in a Blue Origin rocket along with five other women on Monday, marking the first all-female space crew in over sixty years.
The Firework singer lifted off from West Texas and became the first artist to sing in space with a rendition of the Louis Armstrong classic, What A Wonderful World.
Read more: Fans Go Wild as Katy Perry Sings in Outer Space
The six-person crew also included Jeff Bezos’ fiancée Lauren Sanchez, CBS host Gayle King, former NASA rocket scientist Aisha Bowe, civil rights activist Amanda Nguyen and film producer Kerianne Flynn.
Read more: Katy Perry: internet reacts to pop star going to outer space
But while Perry was floating in space with her “astronaut girlie friends,” some viewers might have been wondering: who actually owns the rocket that carried them into orbit?
Who owns Blue Origin?
Blue Origin is owned by the third richest man in the world, Jeff Bezoz. The billionaire established the company in 2000 with the vision of enabling millions of people to live and work in space, aiming to preserve Earth by moving heavy industries off-planet.
The official website states three mission objectives: Radically Reduce the Cost of Access to Space, Harness the Vast Resources of Space, and Inspire and Mobilize Future Generations.
Bezoz also founded Amazon in 1994 and owns the newspaper, Washington Post. He stepped down from his role of CEO of Amazon in 2021, which allowed him to give more focus to his space venture.
Speaking to CNBC, he said “Since I stepped down as the CEO of Amazon, I have a lot of time to dedicate to this vision. so I’m going to split my time between this and the Bezos Earth Fund, which is the climate sustainability foundation”.
He was part of Blue Origin’s inaugural crewed spaceflight in the summer of 2021, flying aboard the company’s suborbital New Shepard rocket – the same vehicle that carried Perry and the rest of the all-female crew into space.
“This is a tiny little step of what Blue Origin is going to do. What we’re really trying to do is build reusable space vehicles. It’s the only way to build a road to space, and we need to build a road to space so that our children can build the future,” Bezos told CNBC’s Morgan Brennan”.
Bezos has been the primary investor in Blue Origin, reportedly funding it by selling approximately $1 billion in Amazon stock annually.
Who are Blue Origin’s competitors?
Blue Origin isn’t alone in the race to space. Its biggest rival is Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which he founded in 2002. It is known for revolutionizing space travel with its reusable Falcon rockets and successful crewed missions to the International Space Station. The company is also developing Starship, a massive spacecraft designed for missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond.
In 2015, Blue Origin was the first reusable rocket to complete a soft ground landing, edging out SpaceX by weeks.
Richard Branson also has Virgin Galactic, which focuses on space tourism using a very different aircraft-style launch system. It uses a spaceplane that launches from a mothership mid-air. Unlike Blue Origin or SpaceX, its flights are shorter and designed to give passengers a few minutes of weightlessness and a view of Earth from the edge of space.
