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Jeff Bezos may have been beaten to space by rival Richard Branson, but the billionaire American businessman is poised to make history next week aboard what would be the world’s first unpiloted suborbital flight with an all-civilian crew.

Bezos, the former CEO of Amazon, is due to be part of a four-person crew for a planned 11-minute ride to the edge of space on Tuesday inside his company Blue Origin’s New Shepard spacecraft, another milestone in the nascent and potentially lucrative space tourism sector.

He is set to be joined by his brother and private equity executive Mark Bezos, trailblazing octogenarian woman aviator Wally Funk, and an as-yet-unidentified person who paid $28 million (roughly Rs. 210 crores) for a spot aboard the spacecraft, scheduled to launch from a West Texas site.

New Shepard is a 60-foot-tall (18.3-meters-tall) and fully autonomous rocket-and-capsule combo that cannot be piloted from inside the spacecraft. The crew is set to include only civilians and none of Blue Origin’s employees or staff astronauts, three people familiar with the company’s plans told Reuters.

Blue Origin’s astronauts include NASA space shuttle veteran Nicholas Patrick.

“To see the Earth from space, it changes you, it changes your relationship with this planet, with humanity,” Bezos said in a video last month discussing the flight.

There has never before been a fully autonomous suborbital or orbital flight with an all-civilian crew, Teal Group space industry analyst Marco Caceres said.

Branson, the British billionaire businessman, was aboard his company Virgin Galactic’s rocket plane for its pioneering suborbital flight from New Mexico on Sunday. The Virgin Galactic flight included two pilots, as well as the company’s chief astronaut instructor and its lead operations engineer.

New Shepard lifts off from a standing position on a launch pad, like traditional rocket launches. With Virgin Galactic, a rocket-powered spaceplane was dropped from a carrier plane in mid-air.

New Shepard, like Virgin Galactic’s flight, will not enter into orbit around Earth, but will take the passengers some 62 miles up (100km) before the capsule returns by parachute. Virgin Galactic’s flight reached 53 miles (86km) above Earth.

Billionaire businessman Elon Musk’s space transportation company SpaceX is planning an even-more-ambitious mission in September, sending an all-civilian crew for a several-day orbital flight aboard its Crew Dragon capsule.

‘Simple math’

Blue Origin’s flight is two decades in the making. Bezos founded the company in 2000. A pilotless craft was a financial strategy adopted by Blue Origin executives years ago.

“It’s simple math,” said one of the people familiar with the company’s thinking. “If you design a system so that you don’t need a pilot or a co-pilot you can have more paying customers.”

New Shepard can accommodate six people. Blue Origin and industry insiders had previously discussed company employees going up on the first flight.

A Blue Origin spokesperson confirmed the decision was made for four seats to offer an enhanced customer experience for the first flight.

The decision to skip over Blue Origin’s staff astronauts and technical experts has caused frustration for some company insiders who viewed the first crewed flight as a crucial opportunity to gather data and technical feedback for a program in its infancy, and to evaluate the experience for future paying customers, the sources said.

A seasoned astronaut would provide a calming presence for civilian crew members as New Shepard blasts off at speeds upwards of 2,200 miles (3,540km) per hour, the sources added.

The crew members will receive two days of training. Blue Origin has assigned two staff members, on the ground, to help the passengers strap in and to provide point-by-point instructions over headsets during the mission.

“It’s kind of like getting on a ride at an amusement park,” Caceres said. “You just trust that everything has been checked out, is in good working order … and you just sit back and enjoy the ride.”

Some industry sources have expressed concerns that passengers – overwhelmed by the experience or in a state of euphoria – could be rattled by routine noises, miss key instructions, pass out or injure themselves floating around the cabin, potentially dangerous scenarios a trained astronaut could respond to.

Funk, 82, was one of 13 women who passed the same rigorous testing as the Mercury Seven male astronauts in NASA’s 1960s space programme but were denied the chance to become astronauts because of their gender.

Proving the safety of space travel is important to developing what Swiss investment bank UBS estimates will be a $3 billion (roughly Rs. 22,350 crores) annual tourism market a decade from now.

“One of the main goals of the New Shepard mission is to demonstrate that going to suborbital space is perfectly safe for the average person,” Caceres said. “So there is a benefit to having as many average people on these flights as possible.”

© Thomson Reuters 2021


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SpaceX Rocket Launches 28 Starlink Satellites, Makes 26th Booster Reuse

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SpaceX Rocket Launches 28 Starlink Satellites, Makes 26th Booster Reuse

SpaceX launched its next batch of Starlink V2 Mini satellites on a Falcon 9 rocket launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station shortly before midnight on Tuesday. The Starlink 10-29 mission added another 28 satellites into the low Earth orbit megaconstellation. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off at 11:37 p.m. EDT (0337 GMT on July 30) from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.

After a nine minute climb into space, the 28 Starlink broadband internet satellites (group 10-29) were on track to be deployed into their intended orbit. After payload deployment, the Falcon 9 first stage separated and successfully landed on the ocean-going droneship “Just Read the Instructions”, positioned in the Atlantic Ocean.

This mission notably marked the 26th flight for the Falcon 9’s first stage, booster B1069, which has been a part of missions include diverse payloads such as CRS-24, Eutelsat HOTBIRD 13F, OneWeb 1, SES-18 and SES-19, alongside 22 other Starlink deployments.

According to satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell, the Starlink constellation now includes over 8,050 active satellites (out of more than 9,300 launched since 2018). The growing fleet is intended to provide high-speed internet worldwide, and each launch like this one adds capacity and coverage. The mission also highlights SpaceX’s extraordinary launch cadence and technical progress.

It was the company’s 96th launch of 2025, reflecting a packed schedule and intense operational tempo. Two more missions were scheduled later that week — another Starlink launch from California and NASA’s Crew-11 flight to the International Space Station. The repeated reuse of boosters (as evidenced by B1069’s 26 flights) is central to lowering costs and sustaining this ambitious cadence.

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Smithsonian Air and Space Museum Reopens with SpaceX Rocket, Mars Habitat and More

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Smithsonian Air and Space Museum Reopens with SpaceX Rocket, Mars Habitat and More

Hundreds waited at the ready outside the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum on Monday (July 28), when “the doors opened for access to five featured and newly renovated galleries that capture the history, contemporary status, and futuristic vision of aviation and space exploration. These refurbished spaces showcase a mix of historic and high-tech artifacts such as John Glenn’s “Friendship 7” capsule, pieces of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, and a 3D-printed Mars habitat. Visitors were among the first to experience a sweeping display of innovation, housed within the museum’s revitalised main building on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

Smithsonian’s $900M Overhaul Brings Futuristic Space Exhibits and Aviation History to Life

As per a Smithsonian statement, the reimagined exhibits are part of a $900 million full-building transformation launched in 2018, scheduled for completion by July 2026—the museum’s 50th anniversary. This phase marks the second group of reopened galleries since the start of 2022. After a three-year closure, the north entrance opened for the first time, leading visitors through a newly wing-shaped vestibule and into “Boeing Milestones of Flight Hall”, now with improved lighting, digital screens, and iconic artefacts.

Next to it, a new “Futures in Space” gallery showcases domestic exhibitions from private space companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, and Axiom Space. Rather than a chronological or program-based layout, the gallery explores philosophical and practical questions about space: Who decides who goes? Why do we venture out? What will we do once we arrive? The immersive layout blends historical items, contemporary designs, and even pop culture references.

The museum has reopened galleries such as “Barron Hilton Pioneers of Flight”, “World War I: The Birth of Military Aviation”, and “Allan and Shelley Holt Innovations Gallery”, and the upgraded Lockheed Martin IMAX Theatre, praised as educational and inspirational.

Despite free entry, the Smithsonian Museum reopened to more than 6,000 guests, who must pick up timed-entry passes in order to better manage crowd flow.

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NASA’s Solar Observatory Sees Two Eclipses in One Day

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NASA’s Solar Observatory Sees Two Eclipses in One Day

NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) has witnessed and recorded an unprecedented phenomenon of two solar eclipses in one day on July 25, 2025. These two eclipses took place only hours apart that day, and were photographed by SDO instruments pointed up and away from the Sun in geosynchronous orbit. First, around 2:45 UTC, the Moon passed between SDO and the Sun. Then, starting at about 6:30 UTC, Earth itself eclipsed the Sun from SDO’s point of view, with the Sun disappearing behind our planet shortly before 8:00 UTC. Since launching in 2010, SDO has continuously monitored the Sun’s activity, from solar flares to magnetic fields, helping forecasters predict space weather.

Moon Transit

According to NASA, SDO orbits Earth in a high geosynchronous orbit, so it has an almost constant view of the Sun. On July 25, this vantage point captured a partial solar eclipse as the Moon passed between the spacecraft and the Sun. NASA’s mission team had predicted this “lunar transit” would cover about 62% of the solar disk. Indeed, the Moon’s silhouette moved slowly across the Sun (around 2:45–3:35 UTC), blocking roughly two-thirds of the bright disk at maximum. The observatory’s ultraviolet telescope (AIA) recorded the event, revealing the Sun’s lower atmosphere and coronal loops around the sharply defined lunar edge. This transit was the deepest lunar eclipse SDO saw in 2025.

Earth’s Eclipse from Space

Hours later, on the same day, Earth itself passed between SDO and the Sun. Beginning around 6:30 UTC on July 25, our planet fully blocked the observatory’s view of the solar disk. This occurred during SDO’s regular eclipse season (a roughly three-week period twice each year when Earth’s orbit crosses the satellite’s line of sight). The total eclipse lasted until shortly before 8:00 UTC. In SDO’s images, Earth’s shadow has a fuzzy edge because our atmosphere scatters sunlight, in contrast to the Moon’s crisp eclipse.

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