Everything you need to know ahead of Jeff Bezos’ space travel

The world's richest man Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and Blue Origin, is preparing for an 11-minute 2,300-mph rocket-powered journey to the edge of space, just nine days after Richard Branson.

Bezos' flight, and the technology created by his company Blue Origin to bring him there, is vastly different from Branson's, reports CNN.

Blue Origin's New Shepard - which has completed 15 autonomous test flights with no humans aboard - is a compact, suborbital rocket that takes off vertically from a launchpad.

It provides a shorter but faster experience than Branson's Virgin Galactic's aerial-launched space aircraft.

Bezos confirmed in early June that he will fly on the first-ever crewed trip, scheduled for 20 July. The mission is scheduled to launch Tuesday about 8 am ET.

The rocket and capsule will be launched from Blue Origin's own facilities in rural Texas, near Van Horn, roughly 120 miles east of El Paso.

Here's everything you need to know before the big event.

Who's going?

Bezos will be only bringing only three others along with him on this first trip to space - his brother Mark Bezos, Wally Funk, an 82-year-old pilot and one of the "Mercury 13" women; and Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old recent high school graduate.

What will happen?

Even though most people would expect space travel to mean circling the earth, Bezos and his fellow travellers will instead just like New Shepard's test flights will just go up and come back down in 11 minutes. 

At three times the speed of sound, New Shepard's suborbital flight will fly directly upward until the rocket's fuel runs out.

The crew capsule will then separate from the rocket at the top of the trajectory and short continue upward before almost hovering at the top of its flight path.

This will offer the passengers a few minutes of weightlessness before they descend toward the ground which will prompt the capsule to deploy parachutes to slow its descent. 

After detaching from the human-carrying capsule, the rocket will re-ignite its engines and use its on-board computers to execute a precise, upright landing, somewhat like SpaceX's Falcon 9 rockets.

How is this different from what SpaceX and Virgin Galactic do?

Elon Musk's SpaceX is not the same as Blue Origin, which will launch on Tuesday. SpaceX manufactures rockets for orbital flights, but Blue Origin's New Shepard will be going for suborbital flights.

Suborbital flights do not have to go as fast as orbital flights. They only need to get above the 50-mile or 62-mile threshold, which is regarded the international demarcation line.

What New Shepard will do on Tuesday will more closely resemble what Richard Branson did. 

How risky is this?

Space travel has historically been plagued with danger, but suborbital flights require significantly less power and speed than orbital rockets, making the voyage less dangerous than people believe.

Still, there are risks involved whenever a human buckles themself into a rocket.

"Ever since I was five years old, I've dreamed of traveling to space," Bezos wrote in his June announcement on Instagram as a declaration for his tenacity and determination to go beyond the risk.