False: Jeff Bezos did not go to space.

By: Alice Franklin
July 23 2021

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Footage of the Blue Origin flight wasn't faked through CGI. Jeff Bezos, the founder and executive chairman of Amazon, really did go to space. Jeff Bezos, the founder and executive chairman of Amazon, traveled aboard a Blue Origin flight on July 20, 2021. The Blue Origin vehicle, New Shepard, successfully passed the Kármán line. The Kármán line is an imaginary boundary 100km above sea level. It marks what many consider to be the edge of space. Blue Origin is Jeff Bezos' private spaceflight company. The flight lasted for 11 minutes, during which Bezos and three other passengers experienced zero gravity for about four minutes. The other passengers were Mark Bezos (Jeff Bezos' brother), an 82-year-old aerospace pioneer called Wally Funk, and an 18-year-old called Oliver Daemen. There is no evidence that the Blue Origin flight was faked. Despite this, social media users have been alleging that footage of the Blue Origin flight was created through CGI. A viral video features a man speaking over real footage from July 20. The footage has apparently been taken from CNBC. The speaker points to a brief instance of grainy footage as evidence of the CGI claim. He casts doubt about the footage, mentioning the baseless flat earth theory, as well as tangentially referring to the Moon Landing Hoax Theory. The man speaking is apparently from the factually dubious Stranger Than Fiction News: a channel that has promoted a number of baseless conspiracy theories. Whenever a significant space voyage takes place, claims such as this one tend to circulate. The Blue Origin Hoax Theory is thematically similar to the Moon Landing Hoax Theory. In a piece for the Guardian, journalist Richard Godwin wrote about why many still believe that the Moon landing didn't happen: "Given an implausible event for which there is lots of evidence (Apollo 11) and a plausible event for which there is zero evidence (the moon hoax), some people will opt for the latter."