Blue Origin is back in the space tourism business. On May 19, Jeff Bezos’s space company successfully delivered six customers to the edge of space and back. The flight broke a nearly two-year hiatus from crewed missions. This was Blue Origin’s seventh human spaceflight. The NS-25 mission — a fast walk to cross the Karman line, the conventional boundary of space, about 100 km above the Earth’s surface — launched from the company’s first launch site in West Texas.
Liftoff of #NS25 pic.twitter.com/81W4Pfx8xP
— Blue Origin (@blueorigin) May 19, 2024
Among the six people in the New Shepard capsule was 90-year-old sculptor and author Ed Dwight, a former Air Force captain who was the first black astronaut candidate when he was selected for the training program in 1961. He completed the training but was ultimately not selected for NASA’s Astronaut Corps, and has never walked in space. Also on board were venture capitalist Mason Angel, French beer magnate Sylvain Chiron, entrepreneur Kenneth L. Hess, retired accountant Carol Schaller, and pilot Gopi Totakura. The tourists were briefly able to unfasten their seat belts and experience zero gravity.
The crew successfully landed about 10 minutes after launch. One of the capsule’s three parachutes did not open properly on the way back, but this did not create any problems for the landing due to the redundancy of the system that takes into account such situations.
This was the 25th New Shepard mission and the seventh flight of Blue Origin with a crew. The last time the module flew with a crew was in August 2022, but the following month, during the launch of the payload mission, an engine nozzle malfunctioned, and there were no flights until December 2023, when it was launched with a payload mission. The company does not publicly disclose the cost of the flight for tourists.
Source: Space.com
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