American businessman Jeff Bezos flies to space aboard New Shepard NS-16 operated by his private spaceflight company Blue Origin.

Jeffrey Preston Bezos is an American businessman best known as the founder, executive chairman, and former president and CEO of Amazon, the world's largest e-commerce and cloud computing company. According to Forbes, as of May 2025, Bezos's estimated net worth exceeded $220 billion, making him the third richest person in the world. He was the wealthiest person from 2017 to 2021, according to Forbes and the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

New Shepard is a fully reusable sub-orbital launch vehicle developed for space tourism by Blue Origin. The vehicle is named after Alan Shepard, who became the first American to travel into space and the fifth person to walk on the Moon. The vehicle is capable of vertical takeoff and landings. Additionally, it is also capable of carrying humans and customer payloads into a sub-orbital trajectory.

Blue Origin NS-16 was a sub-orbital spaceflight mission operated by Blue Origin which flew on 20 July 2021. The mission was the sixteenth flight of the company's New Shepard integrated launch vehicle and spacecraft, and its first flight with humans aboard. It carried into space American billionaire and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos, his brother Mark, pilot and Mercury 13 member Wally Funk, and Dutch student Oliver Daemen. The flight commenced from Blue Origin's Corn Ranch sub-orbital launch site in West Texas aboard the third flight of New Shepard booster NS4 and the spacecraft RSS First Step, both having previously flown on NS-14 and NS-15 earlier in the year.

Private spaceflight is any spaceflight development that is not conducted by a government agency, such as NASA or ESA.