The United States has thwarted the aspirations of the world’s richest man Jeff Bezos and billionaire businessman Richard Branson to call themselves astronauts and changed the “definition” of astronauts.
The US government has refused to recognize Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man in space and the founder of the online company Amazon, and Richard Bernison, a British businessman, as astronauts.
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Who will be called an astronaut? The US government has changed the rules in this regard. According to the rules of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), those who want to be called astronauts now need to be part of the crew that takes the rocket safely into space and play a role in making space travel safer. what happened.
Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are no longer astronauts in the eyes of the US government after this new definition of astronaut.
For the first time since the FAA’s Wings program began in 2004, the rules have changed. The U.S. government agency announced the change the day Jeff Bezos flew his Blue Origin company’s New Shepherd rocket into space.
FAA officials said in a statement that the changes to the Wings scheme were aimed at providing protection to the public during commercial flights.
A spokesman for the Federal Aviation Authority said in an interview that the acquisition of astronaut wings in the United States could only be done through the US space agency NASA and the military.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, along with his brother, Willie Funk, an 18-year-old student and a woman, completed the space flight in a Blue Origin rocket in 10 minutes and 10 seconds on July 20, before July 11. Billionaire British businessman Richard Branson returned to Earth with three other passengers and two pilots after a space trip on his company’s Virgin Galactic rocket. Before that, only professional astronauts went into space.
