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Jeff Bezos inaugurates space tourism for the super rich

The richest man on the planet, Jeff Bezos, took a "short trip" into space today on the first flight of his rocket, the New Shepard.

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Space tourism is already a reality. The richest man on the planet, Jeff Bezos, took a "short trip" into space today on the first flight of his rocket, the New Shepard. He has done it accompanied by his brother Mark Bezos, the pioneer of the aerospace career Wally Funk, who at 82 years old becomes the oldest person to go to space, and Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old student who is the youngest person to do it.

The capsule they travelled in had the largest windows ever flown into space, with amazing views of Earth. "Best day ever!" Bezos said upon landing after the 10 minute and 10-second trip. With this experience, the Amazon tycoon's company, Blue Origin, opens its space tourism business.

The trip will only be available to the super-rich. A seat on one of the company's space flights costs more than $ 20 million. Its competitor, Virgin Galactic, offers rates of around two million dollars. Elon Musk's company Space X has already made several space trips and has a turnover of 150 million dollars per seat. However, 82% of the world's population has never travelled by plane, where prices are much more affordable.

Bezos's company has been criticized by those who believe the money could have been spent on raising employee wages or fighting climate change. To which the founder of Amazon responds that he endeavours to move the entire polluting industry of the Earth to conserve "this beautiful gem of a planet."

The Spanish origin of Jeff Bezos

Jeff Bezos' grandfather on his paternal side was born in a small town of fewer than 500 inhabitants, Villafrechós, in the province of Valladolid, in Spain. Although he moved to Cuba a hundred years ago, the richest man in the world was interested in knowing the land of his ancestor and visited it in 2011.

The village is now working on a project, which they keep under jealous secrecy, to attract an economic investment from Bezos that will allow them to stop the demographic drain they have suffered for years. Among other shortcomings, in Villafrechós sometimes there is no mobile coverage. The mayor of the town allowed himself only to say that the idea they have for the founder of Amazon "does not exist in Spain" and he hopes that it will create around 100 jobs if he manages to convince the businessman.

The lover of mathematics

Bezos's grandmother on her mother's side was a compulsive smoker. Bezos spent a lot of time with her and his grandfather on a ranch in Texas, and there he developed a keen interest in mathematics. He “calculated the oxygen consumption of the people, the monthly expenditure on food. All useless statistics", he told at a conference at Princeton in 2010.
 
One of the things he calculated was how long his grandmother would lose her life if she continued to smoke that way: 9 years. When he told her, she burst into tears.
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