Blue Origin completes 7th crewed spaceflight after two-year break
Blue Origin, the spaceflight company owned by Jeff Bezos, successfully flew six paying customers to the edge of space and back on May 19. This event marked the end of a nearly two-year hiatus from crewed missions for the company. The mission, known as NS-25, was Blue Origin's seventh trip with humans on board and the 25th mission for the New Shepard rocket. The crew lifted off from Launch Site One in West Texas shortly after 10:30am ET (8:00pm IST).
Crew members experienced zero gravity
The crew included six individuals, among them 90-year-old Ed Dwight, a former Air Force Captain and the first Black astronaut candidate selected for training in 1961. Other passengers were Sylvain Chiron, Mason Angel, Kenneth L. Hess, Carol Schaller, and Gopi Thotakura. The team experienced zero gravity as they crossed the Kármán line, the boundary of space approximately 100km above Earth. They safely returned to Earth about 10 minutes after launch.
Safe landing despite parachute malfunction
Despite one of the capsule's three parachutes failing to deploy properly on the return trip, there were no issues with its touchdown due to system redundancies. Blue Origin last flew a crew in August 2022 but experienced a structural failure in its engine nozzle during a payload mission launch in September of that year. The company traced this failure to a thermo-structural issue in the rocket's single engine. New Shepard returned to flight in December 2023 with another payload mission.
Oldest person to travel to space
Ed Dwight's participation in the mission is particularly noteworthy as he was controversially rejected by NASA's astronaut corps in 1960s. At 90 years old, Dwight has now become the oldest person to travel to space. This record was previously held by Star Trek actor William Shatner who launched with Blue Origin in 2021. The price for a seat on New Shepard missions remains undisclosed, but Blue Origin's competitor, Virgin Galactic, charges $450,000 per person for a ride on VSS Unity.
