Jeff Bezos blasted into space Tuesday on his rocket company’s first flight with people on board, becoming the second billionaire in just over a week to ride his own spacecraft.
The Amazon founder was accompanied by a hand-picked group: his brother, an 18-year-old from the Netherlands and an 82-year-old aviation pioneer from Texas — the youngest and oldest to ever fly in space.
“Best day ever,” Bezos said after the capsule touched down on the desert floor at the end of the 10-minute flight.
A post-launch media briefing will be held at 11 a.m. ET and streamed online.
Named after America’s first astronaut, Alan Shepard, the Blue Origin rocket soared from remote West Texas on the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, a date chosen by Bezos for its historical significance. He held fast to it, even as Virgin Galactic’s Richard Branson pushed up his own flight from New Mexico in the race for space tourist dollars and beat him by nine days.
Blue Origin reached an altitude of about 106 kilometres, more than 16 kilometres higher than Branson’s July 11 ride. The 18-metre (60-foot) booster accelerated to Mach 3 or three times the speed of sound to get the capsule high enough, before separating and landing upright.
Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and space tourism company Blue Origin, exits Blue Origin’s New Shepard capsule after it parachuted safely down to the launch area with passengers Mark Bezos, Oliver Daemen and Wally Funk, near Van Horn, Texas, on Tuesday, July 20. (Blue Origin/The Associated Press)
The passengers had several minutes of weightlessness to float around the spacious white capsule. The window-filled capsule landed under parachutes, with Bezos and his guests briefly experiencing nearly six times the force of gravity, or 6 G’s, on the way back.
Joining them on the ultimate joyride was the company’s first paying customer, Oliver Daemen, a last-minute fill-in for the mystery winner of a $28 million US auction who opted for a later flight. The Dutch teen’s father took part in the auction, and agreed on a lower undisclosed price last week when Blue Origin offered his son the vacated seat.
Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket lifts off on Tuesday. The 18-metre booster accelerated to Mach 3 or three times the speed of sound to get the capsule high enough, before separating and landing upright. (Blue Origin/The Associated Press)
How to get on the next two 2021 flights
Blue Origin — founded by Bezos in 2000 in Kent, Wash., near Amazon’s Seattle headquarters — has yet to open ticket sales to the public or reveal the price. For now, it’s booking auction bidders. Two more passenger flights are planned by year’s end, said Blue Origin CEO Bob Smith.
The recycled rocket and capsule that carried up Tuesday’s passengers were used on the last two space demos, according to company officials.
Virgin Galactic already has more than 600 reservations at $250,000 US apiece. Founded by Branson in 2004, the company has sent crew into space four times and plans two more test flights from New Mexico before launching customers next year.
Passengers of the Blue Origin ship enter the capsule near Van Horn, Texas, on Tuesday, before their 9 a.m. flight. (Blue Origin/The Associated Press)
Blue Origin’s approach was slower and more deliberate. After 15 successful unoccupied test flights to space since 2015, Bezos finally declared it was time to put people on board. The Federal Aviation Administration agreed last week, approving the commercial space licence.
Remarkable passengers for a space flight
Bezos, 57, who also owns The Washington Post, claimed the first seat. The next went to his 50-year-old brother, Mark Bezos, an investor and volunteer firefighter, then Funk and Daemen. They spent two days together in training.
University of Chicago space historian Jordan Bimm said the passenger makeup is truly remarkable. Imagine if the head of NASA decided he wanted to launch in 1961 instead of Alan Shepard on the first U.S. spaceflight, he said in an email.
“That would have been unthinkable!” Bimm said. “”It shows just how much the idea of who and what space is for has changed in the last 60 years.”
(Left to right) Mark Bezos, brother of Jeff Bezos; Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and space tourism company Blue Origin; Oliver Daemen, of the Netherlands; and Wally Funk, aviation pioneer from Texas, flew on Blue Origin’s first space tourism flight today. (Blue Origin/The Associated Press)
Bezos stepped down earlier this month as Amazon’s CEO and just last week donated $200 million US to renovate the National Air and Space Museum. Most of the $28 million US from the auction has been distributed to space advocacy and education groups, with the rest benefiting Blue Origin’s Club for the Future, its own education effort.
Fewer than 600 people have reached the edge of space or beyond. Until Tuesday, the youngest was 25-year-old Soviet cosmonaut Gherman Titov and the oldest at 77 was Mercury-turned-shuttle astronaut John Glenn.
Both Bezos and Branson want to drastically increase those overall numbers, as does SpaceX’s Elon Musk, who’s skipping brief space hops and sending his private clients straight to orbit for tens of millions apiece, with the first flight coming up in September.
Despite appearances, Bezos and Branson insist they weren’t trying to outdo each other by strapping in themselves. Bezos noted this week that only one person can lay claim to being first in space: Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who rocketed into orbit on April 12, 1961.
“This isn’t a competition, this is about building a road to space so that future generations can do incredible things in space,” he said on NBC’s “Today.”
WATCH | The impact of Richard Branson’s space flight:
Former NASA scientist Tanya Harrison discusses the importance of Virgin Galactic’s first space flight with Richard Branson and the impact it could have on future space travel. 3:01
Blue Origin is working on a massive rocket, New Glenn, to put payloads and people into orbit from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The company also wants to put astronauts back on the moon with its proposed lunar lander Blue Moon; it’s challenging NASA’s sole contract award to SpaceX.
TOKYO (AP) — Japanese technology group SoftBank swung back to profitability in the July-September quarter, boosted by positive results in its Vision Fund investments.
Tokyo-based SoftBank Group Corp. reported Tuesday a fiscal second quarter profit of nearly 1.18 trillion yen ($7.7 billion), compared with a 931 billion yen loss in the year-earlier period.
Quarterly sales edged up about 6% to nearly 1.77 trillion yen ($11.5 billion).
SoftBank credited income from royalties and licensing related to its holdings in Arm, a computer chip-designing company, whose business spans smartphones, data centers, networking equipment, automotive, consumer electronic devices, and AI applications.
The results were also helped by the absence of losses related to SoftBank’s investment in office-space sharing venture WeWork, which hit the previous fiscal year.
WeWork, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2023, emerged from Chapter 11 in June.
SoftBank has benefitted in recent months from rising share prices in some investment, such as U.S.-based e-commerce company Coupang, Chinese mobility provider DiDi Global and Bytedance, the Chinese developer of TikTok.
SoftBank’s financial results tend to swing wildly, partly because of its sprawling investment portfolio that includes search engine Yahoo, Chinese retailer Alibaba, and artificial intelligence company Nvidia.
SoftBank makes investments in a variety of companies that it groups together in a series of Vision Funds.
The company’s founder, Masayoshi Son, is a pioneer in technology investment in Japan. SoftBank Group does not give earnings forecasts.
Shopify Inc. executives brushed off concerns that incoming U.S. President Donald Trump will be a major detriment to many of the company’s merchants.
“There’s nothing in what we’ve heard from Trump, nor would there have been anything from (Democratic candidate) Kamala (Harris), which we think impacts the overall state of new business formation and entrepreneurship,” Shopify’s chief financial officer Jeff Hoffmeister told analysts on a call Tuesday.
“We still feel really good about all the merchants out there, all the entrepreneurs that want to start new businesses and that’s obviously not going to change with the administration.”
Hoffmeister’s comments come a week after Trump, a Republican businessman, trounced Harris in an election that will soon return him to the Oval Office.
On the campaign trail, he threatened to impose tariffs of 60 per cent on imports from China and roughly 10 per cent to 20 per cent on goods from all other countries.
If the president-elect makes good on the promise, many worry the cost of operating will soar for companies, including customers of Shopify, which sells e-commerce software to small businesses but also brands as big as Kylie Cosmetics and Victoria’s Secret.
These merchants may feel they have no choice but to pass on the increases to customers, perhaps sparking more inflation.
If Trump’s tariffs do come to fruition, Shopify’s president Harley Finkelstein pointed out China is “not a huge area” for Shopify.
However, “we can’t anticipate what every presidential administration is going to do,” he cautioned.
He likened the uncertainty facing the business community to the COVID-19 pandemic where Shopify had to help companies migrate online.
“Our job is no matter what comes the way of our merchants, we provide them with tools and service and support for them to navigate it really well,” he said.
Finkelstein was questioned about the forthcoming U.S. leadership change on a call meant to delve into Shopify’s latest earnings, which sent shares soaring 27 per cent to $158.63 shortly after Tuesday’s market open.
The Ottawa-based company, which keeps its books in U.S. dollars, reported US$828 million in net income for its third quarter, up from US$718 million in the same quarter last year, as its revenue rose 26 per cent.
Revenue for the period ended Sept. 30 totalled US$2.16 billion, up from US$1.71 billion a year earlier.
Subscription solutions revenue reached US$610 million, up from US$486 million in the same quarter last year.
Merchant solutions revenue amounted to US$1.55 billion, up from US$1.23 billion.
Shopify’s net income excluding the impact of equity investments totalled US$344 million for the quarter, up from US$173 million in the same quarter last year.
Daniel Chan, a TD Cowen analyst, said the results show Shopify has a leadership position in the e-commerce world and “a continued ability to gain market share.”
In its outlook for its fourth quarter of 2024, the company said it expects revenue to grow at a mid-to-high-twenties percentage rate on a year-over-year basis.
“Q4 guidance suggests Shopify will finish the year strong, with better-than-expected revenue growth and operating margin,” Chan pointed out in a note to investors.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 12, 2024.
TORONTO – RioCan Real Estate Investment Trust says it has cut almost 10 per cent of its staff as it deals with a slowdown in the condo market and overall pushes for greater efficiency.
The company says the cuts, which amount to around 60 employees based on its last annual filing, will mean about $9 million in restructuring charges and should translate to about $8 million in annualized cash savings.
The job cuts come as RioCan and others scale back condo development plans as the market softens, but chief executive Jonathan Gitlin says the reductions were from a companywide efficiency effort.
RioCan says it doesn’t plan to start any new construction of mixed-use properties this year and well into 2025 as it adjusts to the shifting market demand.
The company reported a net income of $96.9 million in the third quarter, up from a loss of $73.5 million last year, as it saw a $159 million boost from a favourable change in the fair value of investment properties.
RioCan reported what it says is a record-breaking 97.8 per cent occupancy rate in the quarter including retail committed occupancy of 98.6 per cent.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 12, 2024.
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