The former Amazon CEO took only 14 hours of flight training.
Now that Jeff Bezos has reached the edge of space, does that mean the world’s richest man is an astronaut? The claim, made by the spaceflight company belonging to the former CEO of Amazon, has been met with skepticism by some experts. «Our astronauts have completed training and are a go for launch,» Blue Origin, the suborbital spaceflight company owned by Bezos, announced on Twitter yesterday evening (July 19). Less than 10 hours later, at 9:22 a.m. EDT, Bezos and three other passengers — Mary «Wally» Funk, an 82-year-old aviator; Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old son of a Dutch hedge fund CEO; and Bezos’ brother Mark — finished their successful, slightly more than 10-minute flight by touching down in a puff of dust not far from the New Shepard rocket’s launch site in West Texas, Live Science reported. Related: Photos: Blue Origin’s New Shepard mission to space At the highest point of its ascent, Bezos’ passenger capsule crossed the Kármán line, the boundary 62 miles (100 kilometers) above sea level that some scientists use to demarcate where Earth’s atmosphere ends and outer space begins. It could seem like an open and shut case, then: The richest man on the planet went to outer space, so he must be an astronaut. But it takes more than the crossing of a boundary to earn the title, space experts said. «‘Training'» Scott Manley, a space commentator, tweeted as a reply to Blue Origin. «Remember Wally [Funk] has more flight experience than any astronaut in space right now.» Funk has logged 19,600 flight hours on a variety of aircraft and has taught more than 3,000 people to fly. Funk, who prepared to be an astronaut as part of the 1961 Mercury 13 program but was excluded from spaceflight by NASA because of her gender, is the only member of the crew with any flight training. Usually, to qualify as an applicant for a NASA training program, astronauts must have a master’s degree in a STEM field and either two years of relevant professional experience or 1,000 hours of logged pilot-in-command time on a jet aircraft.
