Jeff Bezos

Jeffrey Preston Bezos (born 1964) is an American businessman best known as the founder of Amazon, but he has also been directly involved in commercial spaceflight as the founder of the rocket company Blue Origin, established in 2000. On July 20, 2021, Bezos flew to space aboard Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket on the NS-16 mission, the company's first crewed flight, alongside his brother Mark Bezos, aviation pioneer Wally Funk and teenage physics student Oliver Daemen. The suborbital flight launched from Blue Origin's Launch Site One in West Texas, reached an altitude of about 107 kilometers, past the internationally recognized boundary of space, and lasted roughly ten minutes before the capsule parachuted back to Earth. The flight made Jeff and Mark Bezos the first siblings to fly to space together, and Wally Funk, at 82, became the oldest person to have flown to space at the time. Bezos has continued to fund and direct Blue Origin's development of orbital and lunar launch systems.