Blue Origin sent the first Mexican-born woman and the first crypto-crowdfunded crew member into space today, marking the fifth crewed suborbital flight for Jeff Bezos’ space venture.
In addition to the firsts, there was a “second”: the first Blue Origin customer to take a repeat trip to space.
The New Shepard spaceship lifted off from Blue Origin’s Launch Site One in West Texas at 8:26 a.m. CT (6:26 a.m. PT), sending the crew to a maximum altitude of 66.5 miles (107 kilometers) above sea level — beyond the 100-kilometer Karman Line that marks the internationally accepted boundary of outer space.
While New Shepard’s reusable booster flew itself back to a landing pad, the crew enjoyed a few minutes of weightlessness and an astronaut’s-eye view of Earth. Just a little more than 10 minutes after launch, New Shepard’s crew capsule made a parachute-aided landing amid the Texas rangeland.
2 replies on “Blue Origin space trip marks firsts (and seconds)”
So the woman has no name to you?
She’s just “Mexican-born”?
But you’ve got plenty of repetitive band width for the rich guy with the tasteless company name?
Reporters really need to examine their blind spots that leave gaping holes in their story.
Sincerely; this is the problem of ‘editing’ your own work.
That’s a good point – I shouldn’t have structured the story that way. When I started out writing, I expected that I wouldn’t be coming back to Evan Dick, so I tried to get the bare minimum about him in the second paragraph. But then it turned out that I did come back to him after all. I knew for sure from the start that I’d want to spend more time on Katya Echazaretta and Victor Correa Hespanha, so that’s why I used the shorthand in the lead paragraph. I’m sorry about the way that turned out, and I’ve amended the story to be more evenhanded. (Mentioning all of the crew names lower down, starting with Katya.) Thanks for setting me straight. For what it’s worth, there are folks on the GeekWire team who edit what I write, but it’s not always on a real-time basis for breaking news, as was the case here.