The Change.org petition, which was launched last week, had been signed by over 20,000 people as of Monday morning, June 21. It was originally hoping to get 15,000 signatures to become one of the top signed petitions on Change.org.
One individual who signed the petition called Bezos "a leech that is hoarding capital while billions starve and struggle." Meanwhile, others commented that Bezos should take SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg with him.
Jose Ortiz, the creator of the petition, said that the upcoming spaceflight is a perfect opportunity to rid the world of the man he called an “evil overlord” and urged Blue Origin to stop the rocket from returning to Earth.
"Jeff Bezos is actually Lex Luthor, disguised as the supposed owner of a super successful online retail store," Ortiz wrote. "However, he's actually an evil overlord hell-bent on global domination. We've known this for years. Jeff has worked with the Epsteins and the Knights Templar, as well as the Free Masons to gain control over the whole world. He's also in bed with the flat Earth deniers."
Ortiz jokingly added that keeping Bezos in space is essential before a cabal led by one of the two richest men in the world "enable the 5G microchips and perform a mass takeover."
The petition was addressed to Blue Origin, the rocket launch firm founded by Bezos in 2000 and operator of the upcoming flight. Based in Kent, Washington, Blue Origin focused on suborbital spaceflight services – building cheaper, more reliable and reusable launch vehicles. (Related: Space mining could turn out to be a trillion-dollar industry, say experts.)
Bezos announced in an Instagram post earlier this month that he was headed to space along with his brother Mark and two others – including the winner of the auction for a seat on the Blue Origin's spacecraft called New Shepard.
The winning bid of £20 million ($27.9 million) will be donated to Blue Origin's foundation, Club for the Future. Blue Origin said the auction winner's name will be revealed in the coming weeks. A fourth crew member will also be announced prior to the spaceflight. According to Blue Origin, about 7,600 people from 159 countries had registered to bid for the spaceflight seat.
The space flight will ascend from a desert in western Texas. An autonomous rocket will propel the four passengers above the line that defines the boundary between Earth and outer space. The New Shepard will launch on July 20, the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, flying at more than 2,000 mph to get into space. It will reach an altitude of over 340,000 feet above Earth's atmosphere.
After its moments in orbit, providing a few minutes of weightlessness, the innovative vehicle named after the first American in space, Alan Shepard, will float back on parachutes and land upright.
The spacecraft has already embarked on 15 successful consecutive missions above the Karman Line, which is an imaginary boundary between Earth's atmosphere and outer space, according to Blue Origin. These missions include three successful escape tests "showing the crew escape system can activate safely in any phase of flight."
Blue Origin said in a statement that less than 600 astronauts have ever made it past the Karman Line to "see the borderless Earth and the thin limb of our atmosphere." It will be the first crewed flight of the New Shepard.
The firm has another launch vehicle called New Glenn, named after the first American to orbit Earth, John Glenn. Bezos has announced they are also working on New Armstrong, named after the first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong.
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