The billionaire and three others take a suborbital trip onboard the craft New Shepard
Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder of the spaceflight company Blue Origin, launched into suborbital space with three other people today on the first crewed mission of the company's New Shepard vehicle-a landmark moment for the man and the space tourism industry.
Its descent was punctuated by a deafening sonic boom, along with raucous cheers from the Blue Origin workers here who watched the flight.
On July 11, Virgin Group founder Richard Branson flew on the first fully crewed flight of the VSS Unity space plane, which is operated by Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin's chief rival in the suborbital space tourism business.
Bezos founded Blue Origin in September 2000, six years after he established Amazon.
That changed in 2010, when Blue Origin won a contract from NASA's Commercial Crew Program, which aimed to encourage the development of private American astronaut taxis to fill the shoes of the space shuttle, which was about to retire.
Blue Origin continued to work on its own vehicles, including New Shepard, which is designed to carry people and payloads on brief trips to suborbital space.
The agency didn't fly a female astronaut to space until June 1983, when Sally Ride reached orbit on the space shuttle Challenger's STS-7 mission.
Blue Origin announced on July 1 that today's flight would include Funk.
Virgin Galactic made its big announcement about Branson's flight on July 1, the same day that Blue Origin did its Funk reveal.
New Shepard is an autonomous capsule that launches vertically and lands under parachutes, whereas VSS Unity is a two-pilot space plane that takes off under the wing of a carrier aircraft and lands on a runway.