Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture today provided a brief dose of spaceflight to six people, including the first researcher to conduct his own experiment on a suborbital space trip with NASA support.
The team for Blue Origin’s eighth crewed New Shepard mission included Rob Ferl, a professor and director of the Astraeus Space Institute at the University of Florida. Ferl studies on how living organisms respond to extreme conditions, including the zero-gravity conditions experienced in spaceflight.
During today’s flight at Blue Origin’s Launch Site One in West Texas, Ferl activated an experiment that was meant to document how plants respond to the transitions to and from microgravity.
The mission, known as NS-26, proceeded smoothly. New Shepard’s hydrogen-fueled booster rose into cloudy skies at 8:07 a.m. CT (6:07 a.m. PT), sending the crew capsule past the 100-kilometer (62-mile) Karman Line that marks the internationally accepted boundary of space. Crew members could be heard hooting and hollering on today’s webcast as the spaceship blasted through the cloud cover.
