Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture sent six more people on a brief suborbital space trip today aboard a New Shepard rocket ship. The flight, known as NS-36, was Blue Origin’s 36th New Shepard mission and the 15th crewed flight.
Today’s 10-minute flight was conducted at Blue Origin’s Launch Site One in West Texas. It followed Blue Origin’s standard procedure, with liftoff coming at 8:40 a.m. CT (6:40 a.m. PT). The reusable booster sent the crew capsule to a height of 65.7 miles (346,791 feet, or 106 kilometers), and then flew itself back to a landing pad.
Meanwhile, the crew got out of their seats to float in zero gravity and look out the windows at the black sky of space and the Earth below. They got back in their seats for a parachute-aided descent that ended with touchdown at 8:50 a.m. CT (6:50 a.m. PT).
Here are the crew members for NS-36:
- Will Lewis, CEO of Insmed, a biopharmaceutical company that focuses on developing therapies for patients with serious and rare disease. Blue Origin held back on identifying Lewis as a crew member until after the flight.
- Jeff Elgin, the founder and CEO of FranChoice, a referral network for franchisees with offices across the U.S.
- Danna Karagussova, the co-founder of Portals, a digital project that features self-regulation tools fusing art and science. She’s the first woman from Kazakhstan to go to space as a tourist.
- Clint Kelly III, who started the Autonomous Land Vehicle Project in 1984 while working at the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. He’s credited with starting the development of the technology base leading to today’s driverless cars. Kelly previously flew on New Shepard in 2022.
- Aaron Newman, a serial entrepreneur who founded six software startups. He’s also the founder of Exploring Our Deep World, a nonprofit organization focusing on ocean exploration, conservation and education.
- Vitalii Ostrovsky, a Ukrainian businessman with investments in the hotel and real estate industries. Over the past decade, he has lived in more than 100 countries on every continent, roaming from the Arctic Circle to the ice of Antarctica.
Blue Origin has now flown 80 people, including six repeat customers, above the 100-kilometer Karman Line that marks the internationally accepted boundary of space.
