Jeff Bezos, the richest man on the planet flies to space on Tuesday, accompanied by the oldest and youngest person ever seen on a space flight.

They will board the New Shepard, a vessel developed by the company of the ex-boss of Amazon, Blue Origin.

A big step forward for space tourism. After the British billionaire Richard Branson, who flew last week for a few minutes to the frontier of space, it is the turn of Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, ex-boss of the Amazon group , to visit the great void aboard his New Shepard vessel, developed by his company Blue Origin. Liftoff will take place at 3 p.m. French time from a remote location in the Western Desert of Texas, broadcast live on BlueOrigin.com.

For this trip, the businessman surrounded himself with an atypical crew, with the oldest and youngest person on board the spacecraft ever seen for a space flight: Wally Funk, 82 years old and pioneer of the aviation, then an 18-year-old Dutchman, Oliver Daemen, who paid for his seat and won his seat after an auction. 

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Wally Funk, a member of the Mercury 13 female astronaut training project, had to give up her dream because of the prevailing sexism in the 1960s. She promised to make the most of the trip.

"I'm going to feel it all," she said on NBC, anxious to float and spin in zero gravity.

A legitimate trip? 

The spacecraft will rise to 106 kilometers of altitude, above the border of space.

Passengers will be able to unfasten their seat belts and float in zero gravity for a few minutes.

Then the capsule will return to land autonomously in the Texas desert, slowed down by 3 giant parachutes. 

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The experience promises to be exciting, but intended for the ultra-rich, with a ticket that costs on average 250,000 euros, explains Philippe Baptiste, president of the National Center for Space Studies, who questions the legitimacy of his flights. "We can also wonder about the environmental impact," he emphasizes. "Richard Branson's flight was rather relatively polluting since it is solid propulsion with a lot of CO2 emissions and soot in the atmosphere. Jeff Bezos's is different because it is essentially hydrogen and oxygen that we burn, that is to say we produce water. "

For the specialist, the main question remains the regulation of this future tourism, carried by private companies.

"Space agencies are relatively little involved in these suborbital roles. We look at what these billionaires are doing, but the interest for us is relatively marginal," explains the president of CNES.

Especially since similar sensations are possible with planes thanks to parabolic flights.

"All actors have an interest in there being some form of regulation of space," he assures us. 

Great ambitions

Space tourism is not the only ambition of Jeff Bezos. He would eventually like to compete with Elon Musk's Space X company, and become NASA's main private partner. The businessman thinks big. He is aiming for the moon and further afield. The founder of Amazon created Blue Origin in 2000 with the goal, one day, of building floating space colonies, endowed with artificial gravity and where millions of people could work and live. Blue Origin's rocket New Shepard "is just the beginning," Bob Smith, the aerospace company's chief executive, told a press conference on Sunday.

"You have to be a little realistic", nuance Philippe Baptiste, president of the National Center for Space Studies. "The round trips to the Moon that were made for the United States represent a week. When we talk about a round trip to Mars, we are talking about three years. This poses a number of logistical, technical, physiological problems ... Today we do not know how to make someone survive in this very hostile environment for very long. "