Blue Origin’s Jeff Bezos Announces Eighth Space Tourist Flight for Thursday

Jeff Bezos' aerospace firm, Blue Origin, is preparing for its eighth suborbital space tourism mission this Thursday. It will carry six people on an 11-minute journey beyond the Karman line, which international standards consider the edge of space.

New Shepard will be flying on this mission from Launch Site One in West Texas, with liftoff targeted for 8:00 am CDT (6:30 pm IST). The New Shepard programme has completed 37 human flights so far.

Aboard the flight will be Nicolina Elrick, Rob Ferl, Eugene Grin, Dr. Eiman Jahangir, Karsen Kitchen, and Ephraim Rabin. Notably, Karsen Kitchen will become the youngest woman to cross the Karman line. In addition, Rob Ferl will be the first researcher to be funded by NASA to carry out an experiment on a commercial suborbital flight.

Ferl's experiment will test the response of plant genes to changes in gravity. He'll be taking a snapshot of the activity of all the genes of an Arabidopsis thaliana plant using a Kennedy Space Center Fixation Tube that will be taken back to the lab for analysis. On the ground, co-investigator Anna-Lisa Paul will be mirroring Ferl's experiment and running similar control KFTs at four points during the flight.

Another development: Blue Origin is also working with NASA on the ESCAPADE mission, a concept designed to study how solar wind interacts with Mars' magnetosphere. It will ride aboard Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket, slated for its first flight on Oct. 13.

The New Glenn rocket is named after NASA astronaut John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth in 1962. The rocket is among the largest and most powerful ever built, 98 meters tall, with the capacity for heavy hauls to low-Earth orbit on cleaner fuel. This is designed to make sure that the first stage of the rocket serves at least 25 missions and works just like a commercial airliner, which is really expected to cut both waste and costs countlessly.