Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture has set the date for the long-delayed start of its next chapter in the history of spaceflight.
Six spacefliers are scheduled to take a trip on the company’s New Shepard suborbital spaceship, lifting off from Launch Site One in West Texas on Sunday, Blue Origin announced today. Sunday’s launch window will open at 8:30 a.m. CT (6:30 a.m. PT), and launch coverage will be streamed via BlueOrigin.com starting at T-minus-40 minutes.
As first reported last month, the crew will include retired military test pilot Ed Dwight, who lost out on a chance to become America’s first Black astronaut in the early 1960s. Dwight is now 90 years old, and the Blue Origin flight plan would put him in line to become the oldest person to take a suborbital space trip. If the launch occurs as scheduled, he would exceed the record that Star Trek actor William Shatner set in 2021 by about a month and a half.
Dwight’s flight is sponsored by two nonprofit organizations: Space for Humanity and the Seattle-based Jaison and Jamie Robinson Foundation. (Jaison Robinson, co-founder of Dream Variation Ventures, flew on a New Shepard mission in 2022.)
The other spacefliers for the NS-25 mission — the New Shepard program’s 25th flight — include venture capitalist Mason Angel, French brewery founder Sylvain Chiron, software engineer Kenneth L. Hess, retired CPA and adventure traveler Carol Schaller, and airplane pilot and entrepreneur Gopi Thotakura.
One reply on “Blue Origin sets the date for next suborbital space trip”
A glorified fairground ride. Why take a 1 in a hundred chance of dying, just to spend a few minutes weightless, and just barely to be able to see the curvature of the Earth. Save up for a week at the ISS.