July 20, 2021: World’s richest man, Jeff Bezos is all set to fly to the edge of space on his space travel company's first flight with his brother Mark, 82-year-old aviation pioneer Wally Funk and teenager Oliver Daemen on Tuesday. He will become the second billionaire after Richard Branson to fly to space.

The crew will take off aboard New Shepard, a suborbital capsule and rocket system built by his space company Blue Origin.

New Shepherd rocket is scheduled to blast off from West Texas at 6.30 pm India time.

The planned flight would be Blue Origin’s inaugural crewed mission and a milestone toward Mr. Bezos’ goal of developing a viable space business.

The scheduled trip of Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos to the edge of space Tuesday is expected to last only 11 minutes, but it has been decades in the making.

Mr. Bezos has been building toward the launch since 2000, when he founded Blue Origin. The company has hired staffers to develop rockets, engines and spacecraft and now employs more than 3,500 people at facilities in Florida, California and other locations.

Amidst the anticipation of New Shepard’s launch, the last 24-hour search history in India when you Google ‘Jeff Bezos’ reveals a bizarre fact. One of the top search queries in India is ‘Jeff Bezos girlfriend image’.  Yes, you read right. Along with this, Indians are also searching for the cost of this trip to space.

Bezos is currently in a relationship with Lauren Sanchez. According to Business Insider, Bezos and Lauren Sanchez’s relationship surfaced shortly after the announcement that he and former wife MacKenzie Scott filed for a divorce.

The flight comes nine days after Bezos's rival Richard Branson, the British billionaire businessman, was onboard his company Virgin Galactic's rocket plane on July 11 for its pioneering suborbital flight from New Mexico.

The billionaire businessman is aiming for an altitude of roughly 106 kilometers, around 16 kilometers higher than Richard Branson's flight.

Named after Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard, the first American to go to space, Blue Origin's New Shepard is a reusable suborbital rocket system designed to take astronauts and research payloads past the Kármán line. The flight represents an important milestone in the establishment of the space tourism industry.