Tag: Blue Origin

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.

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture says its next suborbital spaceflight is set for Aug. 29, with a space researcher and a college senior among the mission’s six spacefliers.

Next week’s launch of a reusable New Shepard rocket ship from Blue Origin’s Launch Site One in West Texas will mark the company’s eighth crewed mission, and boost its roll call of suborbital space travelers to 43. The launch window will open at 8 a.m. CT (6 a.m. PT) on the appointed day, and live coverage of the mission will be streamed via Blue Origin’s website starting at T-minus-40 minutes.

New Shepard’s crewed flights resumed in May, more than a year and a half after the failure of an uncrewed mission in 2022 led to a months-long investigation of the incident and a redesign of spacecraft components.

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture today resumed sending people on suborbital space trips after a 21-month gap, and made a Black aerospace pioneer’s 60-year-old dream come true in the process.

“Man, it feels good to be flying again,” launch commentator Ariane Cornell said.

The six spacefliers on Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket ship included Ed Dwight, a retired military test pilot who missed his chance to become NASA’s first Black astronaut in the 1960s. Today’s flight made Dwight, 90, the oldest person to go into space, albeit on a suborbital rather than an orbital trip.

Dwight took part in an Air Force training program that was meant to prepare participants for astronaut duty — but he was passed over. Whether that was because of racial politics or because he was too short to meet NASA’s standards has been a topic of debate. In any case, it would be another two decades before Guion Bluford Jr. became the first Black American in space in 1983.

Dwight went on to become a sculptor but held onto his dream of spaceflight. His Blue Origin trip was sponsored by a nonprofit group called Space for Humanity, with an assist from the Seattle-based Jaison and Jamie Robinson Foundation.

When he stepped out of the capsule at the end of today’s flight, Dwight told well-wishers said that his space experience was “a long time coming” and that he was “overwhelmed.”

“I thought I really didn’t need this in my life, but now I need it in my life,” he said with a laugh. “It’s a life-changing experience. Everybody needs to do this.”

This isn’t the first time Blue Origin has taken a page from space history: In 2021, one of the participants in the company’s first crewed spaceflight was Wally Funk, a member of the “Mercury 13” group of women who went through astronaut training in the 1960s but never got to space. That mission made Funk the world’s oldest spaceflier at the age of 82. Funk’s record was broken by Star Trek actor William Shatner during another Blue Origin flight later that year — and now Dwight has surpassed Shatner’s record by a month and a half.

Dwight’s crewmates on today’s flight were 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. They are presumed to have paid their own way, but Blue Origin isn’t saying how much they paid.

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.