The bad news, millionaires, on the same day that Jeff Bezos blew up Blue Origin’s inaugural crew spaceflight, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) updated the definition of “commercial astronaut” to new standards, according to former Amazon CEO and equivalent Ryan Y. Commercial space astronauts cannot be considered astronauts in the eyes of the Wings program.
According to the first rule change of the program since 2004, astronauts must be part of the flight crew and contribute to space flight safety. The “Billionaire Space Race” has gained a reputation this month. Waiting for the nuclear-armed superpowers to dominate space exploration instead of the old space race, this new showdown involves a huge amount of money using their resources to build commercial spaceflight services.
The goal is to make space travel more accessible, with the goal of spreading humanity free from the solar system and beyond, the earth and its labor laws. The Blue Origin’s first manned spacecraft was launched on July 20 at the upper end of the Earth’s atmosphere. Bezos, the blue source and founder of Amazon, was joined by his brother Mark Bezos, 18-year-old Dutch students Oliver Daemen and Wally.
Funk is an 82-year-old pilot who was part of the so-called Mercury 13; thirteen American women who passed all the physiological screening tests required to join NASA’s astronaut force in 1961 but were excluded from going into space. (Sally Ride will be 22 years before she became the first American woman in space.) Unfortunately for Bezos, the richest man in the solar system, the Blue Origin mission was hit hard by the Virgin Galactic’s Unity 22 mission, which reached the edge of space on July 11 by British billionaire Branson.
To be given “commercial astronaut wings” by the FAA, crews must reach an altitude of 80 kilometers (50 miles) above the Earth’s surface. (It is noteworthy that the Federation, the world governing body for aeronautical and astronomical records, excluding the FAA and NASA, considers the Aeronautical International “space” to be the Kerman Line – a fictitious boundary 100 kilometers (62 miles) above sea level.)
While Bezos and Branson meet FAA criteria, the new definition requires travelers to “show in-flight activities that were essential to public safety, or contribute to human space flight safety.”
