Billionaire Jeff Bezos' aerospace company Blue Origin launched six people to the edge of space and back on Thursday. The eighth tourist mission to suborbital space took six passengers for an 11-minute ride above the Karman line, the internationally recognized boundary of space.
The crew took off in the New Shepard rocket shortly after 8 a.m. CDT 6.30 p.m. IST from Launch Site One in west Texas. "Capsule touchdown. Welcome back, #NS26 crew," tweeted Blue Origin via X.com.
The other five members were Nicolina Elrick, Rob Ferl, Eugene Grin, Dr. Eiman Jahangir, Karsen Kitchen, and Ephraim Rabin. Minutes of weightlessness and the Earth view during the flight, the capsule parachuted safely down to the Texas desert.
Notably, Kitchen emerged as the youngest woman to cross the Karman line, while Ferl is the first NASA-funded researcher to fly an experiment as part of a commercial suborbital space crew. Ferl's experiment tried to help scientists understand how plant genes react to the transition to and from microgravity.
Blue Origin claims that the New Shepard program has so far "flown 37 humans", making this the second mission of the year. The company's flights had been grounded for nearly two years after the New Shepard rocket failed during an uncrewed launch back in September 2022.
This May, Blue Origin launched Indian-origin Captain Gopichand Thotakura, the first person from the country to tour the edge of space on the firm's crewed flight mission.
In direct competition with Elon Musk's SpaceX, Blue Origin will launch its reusable New Glenn rocket on 13 October. Standing 98 meters tall, it is the largest and most powerful rocket ever built and launched. Named after NASA astronaut John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth, its maiden flight will carry NASA's ESCAPADE mission that will study the interaction of solar winds with the magnetosphere of Mars.
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