Tag: Space Tourism

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Black flier gets a second chance to make space history

Ed Dwight as Air Force test pilot
Air Force Capt. Ed Dwight missed out on space in the 1960s. (Courtesy of Ed Dwight via National Geographic)

If the fates decided differently, Air Force test pilot Ed Dwight could have become NASA’s first Black astronaut in the 1960s — but he lost out, amid racial controversy. Now he’s in line to travel to the final frontier with Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture.

Blue Origin listed the 90-year-old Dwight among six people who’ll be on its New Shepard suborbital rocket ship when it resumes crewed flights, on a date yet to be announced. Crewed flights were suspended after an uncrewed research mission went awry in 2022, but a repeat of that uncrewed mission went off without a hitch last December.

Dwight, who became a sculptor after resigning from the Air Force as a captain in 1966, will have his flight sponsored by Space for Humanity and by the Jaison and Jamie Robinson Foundation, which was created by the founders of Seattle-based Dream Variation Ventures.

Dwight’s life story is featured in a National Geographic documentary titled “The Space Race.” In 1961, he was chosen to enter an Air Force flight training program that was regarded as a pathway to NASA’s astronaut corps, and went on to win an Air Force recommendation to join NASA. But Dwight was passed over — and he later said that racism was to blame.

“My hope was just getting into space in any kind of way,” Dwight said in the documentary, “but they were not going to let that happen.”

It would be another two decades before Guion Bluford Jr. became the first Black American in space in 1983.

This isn’t the first time Blue Origin has put a would-be pioneer astronaut on its crew list. The quartet for the company’s first crewed flight in 2021 included Wally Funk, a member of the “Mercury 13” group of women fliers who missed out on joining NASA’s early astronaut corps.

Dwight could be in line to attain a different kind of distinction in space history: As of now, the oldest person to reach space, albeit on a suborbital trip, is William Shatner, the star of the first set of “Star Trek” TV shows and movies. His age was 90 years and 205 days at the time of his flight in October 2021. Dwight is currently 90 years and 208 days old. He could thus wrest away Shatner’s space title. (Blue Origin said “the flight date will be announced soon.”)

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Orbite is raising funds for spaceflight training programs

Illustration: Interior view of Orbite astronaut training facility
Artwork shows an interior view of Orbite's future Astronaut Training and Spaceflight Gateway Campus. (Orbite Illustration)

Orbite Space, a venture that aims to offer down-to-Earth spaceflight training programs on a “try before you fly” basis, is raising more capital amid the company’s preparations for an expansion of operations.

The financial arrangements were reported this week in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

In the filing, Orbite reports an equity offering of $6.775 million and says that $2.725 million of the offering has already been sold. The company says those amounts include the conversion of previously issued convertible securities. So far, seven investors have taken part in the offering, according to the SEC filing.

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Orbite begins the countdown to space training programs

Orbite clients on zero-G airplane flight
Participants in an astronaut orientation session float during a zero-G airplane flight in France in 2021. (Orbite Photo)

After getting its start in Seattle and testing its business model in France and Florida, a space travel venture called Orbite is ready to start signing up customers for private-sector astronaut training programs.

And although it’ll be a while before those programs begin in earnest, Orbite CEO Jason Andrews says the first 500 people to make a refundable deposit will be in for some astronaut-worthy experiences between now and then.

“What we are announcing today is just the beginning,” he said.

Orbite plans to invite early-stage customers in its Founders Club to attend a series of space-adjacent events, starting with a rocket-launch watch party in Florida next spring and continuing with gatherings that could include an underwater adventure in the Florida Keys and a trip to Antarctica.

Andrews said Founders Club members could spend part of their $5,000 pre-booking deposit on one of those tours, or put all the money toward a training program at Orbite’s Astronaut Training and Spaceflight Gateway Campus in Florida.

That training facility, mapped out by French industrial designer Phillippe Starck, is due to be built at a site that’s yet to be disclosed in the area around Florida’s Space Coast and Orlando. Protracted business negotiations led to delays in the development schedule, but the facility is currently set to open in 2026, Andrews said.

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Universe Today

Virgin Galactic flies its first private space tourists

Virgin Galactic's VSS Unity fires up rocket motor
Virgin Galactic's VSS Eve lights up its rocket motor for the climb to the edge of space. (Virgin Galactic Photo)

Virgin Galactic sent its first privately funded adventurers — and its first space sweepstakes winners — past the 50-mile space boundary today.

The tourists on the suborbital space trip known as Galactic 02 included Keisha Schahaff, who won two tickets in an online contest organized by the Omaze charity sweepstakes platform and a nonprofit group called Space for Humanity in 2021. She and her daughter, Anastatia Mayers, became the first mother-and-daughter duo to share a spaceflight, and the first spacefliers from the Caribbean island nation of Antigua and Barbuda.

“I kind of feel like I was born in this life for this,” Schahaff, a wellness coach, told NBC’s “Today” show. Her daughter is a college student who aims to become an astrobiologist.

Jon Goodwin — an 80-year-old British adventurer who competed as a canoeist in the 1972 Olympics — also broke barriers on today’s Galactic 02 flight. In 2005, he was one of the first customers to reserve a spot with Virgin Galactic, back when the price was $200,000. Then, almost a decade ago, he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Today he became only the second person with Parkinson’s to take a space trip. (The first was NASA shuttle astronaut Rich Clifford.)

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Virgin Galactic’s space plane aces its final flight test

View from Virgin Galactic Unity rocket plane in flight
A camera mounted on VSS Unity shows the rocket plane in flight with a curving Earth in the background. (Credit: Virgin Galactic)

After a two-year hiatus, Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo VSS Unity resumed flying crew members beyond a 50-mile-high space milestone, marking the end of a years-long flight test program and setting the stage for the start of commercial service as soon as next month.

It was the first launch of the Unity rocket plane from its VMS Eve carrier airplane since July 2021, when company founder Richard Branson took a ride. Branson said he was “proud” to be watching from Spaceport America in New Mexico when Unity took flight.

During today’s suborbital flight test, known as Unity 25, the rocket plane sent two pilots and four other Virgin Galactic employees to a maximum height of 54.2 miles, at a top speed of Mach 2.94.

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Lauren Sanchez plans to ride her beau’s spaceship

Lauren Sanchez at Blue Origin in 2021
Lauren Sanchez is flanked by Blue Origin personnel after her boyfriend Jeff Bezos' space trip in 2021. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

Lauren Sanchez is planning to follow in the footsteps of her billionaire boyfriend, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, by taking a trip aboard the suborbital rocket ship built by Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture. And she plans to bring an all-female crew with her on the mission, which she hopes will take place by early 2024.

Sanchez discussed the space mission, her experience as a helicopter pilot and a media producer — and her relationship with Bezos — in a wide-ranging interview published today by WSJ. Magazine.

The relationship between Sanchez and Bezos — and Bezos’ divorce from his wife MacKenzie Scott — fueled a wave of tabloid stories in 2019. Two years later, Bezos took a ride on Blue Origin’s first crewed spaceflight with Sanchez watching from the wings. Sanchez said Bezos will be “cheering us all on from the sidelines” when she takes her turn aboard the New Shepard spaceship.

“As much as he wants to go on this flight, I’m going to have to hold him back,” she told the magazine.

Sanchez said her five crewmates will be “women who are making a difference in the world and who are impactful and have a message to send.” Their identities haven’t yet been revealed.

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Universe Today

America’s first space tourist signs up for a moon trip

Akiko and Dennis Tito
California investor Dennis Tito and his wife, Akiko Tito, plan to fly around the moon. (SpaceX Photo)

Twenty-one years after becoming the first paying passenger to visit the International Space Station, California financial analyst Dennis Tito and his wife, Akiko Tito, are taking on a new space adventure: a trip on SpaceX’s Starship super-rocket around the moon and back.

The Titos are the first customers to be named as crew members for what’s slated to be SpaceX’s second crewed round-the-moon mission. A time frame for that flight hasn’t been announced, but it’s due to come after the Polaris Program’s first flight of Starship in Earth orbit and the “dearMoon” lunar mission planned by Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa. If the Starship development program proceeds as SpaceX hopes, those first two flights could lift off by the mid-2020s.

Dennis Tito, an 82-year-old former NASA engineer who made his fortune in finance, would be in line to become the oldest human to go into orbit. He would beat the record set by senator-astronaut John Glenn when he flew on the shuttle Discovery at the age of 77. (Star Trek actor William Shatner, who rode a Blue Origin spaceship last year at the age of 90, holds the record for suborbital spacefliers.)

Tito is already in the history books by virtue of his flight to the ISS in 2001. Russia’s Roscosmos space agency had previously flown privately funded travelers to the Mir space station, but Tito was the first American to buy his own ticket for a spaceflight, and the first commercial passenger to visit the ISS.

Most private-sector spacefliers would bristle at the term “space tourist,” but Tito’s status during the 2001 flight comes closest to fitting that description. “I spent most of my time in Zvezda, the service module, where I listened to opera, shot video and stereographic photos of the Earth out of the porthole, helped prepare food and talked with the crew during meals,” he recalled at a congressional hearing.

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First Egyptian and Portuguese spacefliers take a ride

New Shepard liftoff
Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket ship rises from its Texas launch pad. (Blue Origin via YouTube)

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture sent six more crew members on a suborbital space ride, including the first Egyptian and Portuguese citizens to reach the final frontier.

Thanks to today’s flight from Launch Site One in West Texas, Blue Origin’s list of spacefliers has grown to 31 over the course of a little more than a year. Bezos himself went on the first crewed flight in July 2021, and Florida investor Evan Dick bought two tickets to space.

The lineup for NS-22 — the 22nd mission for the New Shepard suborbital launch system, and the sixth crewed flight — set a couple of precedents. Portugal’s first spaceflier is Mario Ferreira, an entrepreneur, investor and president of Porto-based Pluris Investments. The first from Egypt is Sara Sabry, a mechanical and biomedical engineer who founded a nonprofit called Deep Space Initiative. Sabry was the second Blue Origin crew member sponsored by Space for Humanity, a nonprofit that supports citizen astronauts.

Rounding out the “Titanium Feather” crew were Coby Cotton, a co-founder of the Dude Perfect sports/entertainment channel; Vanessa O’Brien, a British-American explorer and former banking executive; Clint Kelly III, who helped pioneer technologies for driverless cars; and Steve Young, former CEO of Young’s Communications LLC.

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Blue Origin crew will mark firsts for Egypt and Portugal

Blue Origin NS-22 crew
Blue Origin reveals its latest crew list, but the launch date hasn’t yet been announced. (Blue Origin Photo)

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture still has some final-frontier firsts up its sleeve: Today the company said its next crewed suborbital flight will send up the first spacefliers to hail from Egypt and Portugal.

But when will they fly? The launch date is still up in the air.

The lineup for Blue Origin’s sixth crewed mission — which is known as NS-22 because it’s the 22nd flight overall, including uncrewed flights — will also include a co-founder of the Dude Perfect sports/entertainment video venture, a British-American mountaineer, a driverless-car pioneer and a former telecom executive.

Today’s crew announcement comes a year and two days after Blue Origin’s first-ever crewed flight, which sent Bezos and three others beyond the 100-kilometer Karman Line that marks the internationally accepted boundary of outer space.

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Blue Origin space trip marks firsts (and seconds)

Blue Origin’s New Shepard spaceship lifts off from its Texas launch pad. (Blue Origin via YouTube)

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.

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