This was the seventh crewed flight for Blue Origin.
In the realm of space tourism, Blue Origin has made a comeback. This morning, the spaceflight business owned by Jeff Bezos said that it had successfully flown six paying customers to the edge of space and back, breaking its nearly two-year hiatus from crewed flights. This was the seventh time that Blue Origin had taken humans on board during a voyage. Launched from the company’s Launch Site One in West Texas shortly after 10:30 a.m. Eastern Time, the mission was a brief excursion to cross the Kármán line, sometimes known as the boundary of space, which is approximately 50 kilometers above the surface of the Earth.
Among the six individuals who were already inside the New Shepard crew capsule was Ed Dwight, who was 90 years old at the time. He had previously served as a captain in the Air Force and was the first Black person to be selected for the astronaut training program in 1961. He participated in training, but in the end, he was not chosen for the Astronaut Corps of NASA. As a result, he has never before attempted to travel into space. In addition to Mason Angel, Sylvain Chiron, Kenneth L. Hess, Carol Schaller, and Gopi Thotakura, the following individuals were also present. In a fleeting moment, they were able to disengage their seatbelts and experience the sensation of zero gravity.
The crew was able to return to the ground without incident approximately ten minutes after the launch. On the return flight, one of the capsule’s three parachutes failed to release correctly; nevertheless, this did not cause any issues for the capsule’s landing because the system included redundancies that are designed to deal with situations exactly like this one.
Additionally, this was the 25th flight that a New Shepard rocket has completed. After the last time it flew a crew, which was in August 2022, it experienced a structural breakdown in its engine nozzle during the launch of a payload mission the following month. As a result, it did not fly again until December 2023. Now that it has returned to flight with another payload mission, the launch that took place today marks the first time in almost two years that it has ever carried human passengers.