Blue Origin is back in the space tourism game. Jeff Bezos' spaceflight company successfully took six paying customers to the edge of space and back this morning, breaking its nearly two-year hiatus from crewed missions. This was Blue Origin's seventh voyage with humans on board. The mission, a quick jaunt to cross the Kármán line, or the edge of space, about 62 miles above Earth, lifted off from the company's Launch Site One in West Texas shortly after 10:30 a.m. ET.
The six people inside the New Shepard crew capsule included Ed Dwight, 90, a former Air Force captain who was the first black astronaut candidate when he was chosen for the training program in 1961. He went through training, but ultimately failed. He selected for NASA's Astronaut Corps and never made it to space until now. Also on board were Mason Angel, Sylvain Chiron, Kenneth L. Hess, Carol Schaller and Gopi Thotakura. They were able to briefly unbuckle their seat belts and experience zero gravity.
The crew landed safely on the ground about 10 minutes after launch. One of the capsule's three parachutes did not deploy correctly on the return trip, but this did not pose any problem for its landing thanks to the system's redundancies that take exactly these types of situations into account.
This was also the 25th mission of a New Shepard rocket. It last flew with a crew in August 2022, but suffered a structural failure in its engine nozzle the following month during the launch of a payload mission and did not fly again until December 2023. It then returned to flight. with another payload mission. making today's launch the first with human passengers in almost two years.
