Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin on Saturday launched four presumably wealthy adventurers and two sponsored contest winners, including a Mexican-born YouTube personality, on a supersonic dash to the edge of space, chalking up the company’s fifth sub-orbital tourist flight in less than a year.
Perched atop a powerful hydrogen-fueled single-stage booster, the New Shepard blasted off from Bezos’ sprawling west Texas ranch and launch site at 9:25 a.m. EDT, kicking off a 10-minute up-and-down thrill ride, briefly carrying the passengers out of the discernible atmosphere.
As the capsule arced over the top of its trajectory 65 miles up, the passengers experienced about three minutes of weightlessness, enjoying spectacular hemispheric views of the Earth below before the ship fell back to Earth for a parachute-assisted touchdown a few thousand feet from the launch pad.
The passengers included investor-engineer Evan Dick, Blue Origin’s first repeat customer; Hamish Harding, British chairman of Action Aviation and a veteran pilot; investor Victor Vescovo, a mountain climber, jet pilot and deep sea diver; and Jaison Robinson, co-founder of Dream Variations Ventures and a finalist on “Survivor: Samoa” in 2009.
“It’s eye opening, it’s beautiful, it’s indescribable,” said Dick of his first flight last December. “I knew after I saw it that I wanted to go again. I mean, I knew immediately.”
Rounding out the crew were two contest winners: Brazilian Victor Correa Hespanha, a civil engineer whose seat was paid for by the “Crypto Space Agency,” and Katya Echazarreta, a 26-year-old Mexican-born YouTube personality working on a master’s in electrical and computer engineering at Johns Hopkins University. She is the youngest American to fly in space.
Echazarreta’s seat was paid for in part by Space For Humanity, a non-profit founded by New Shepard veteran Dylan Taylor, who flew to space with Dick last December. She was selected from more than 7,000 applicants representing more than 100 countries.
“It still feels surreal that I am going to get to experience something that so few people in the world have ever experienced, especially because visiting space is a dream I’ve had for as long as I can remember,” Echazarreta said in a pre-launch release.
“I am honored to be representing not just Space for Humanity in this mission, but also all of the little girls and women out there who are dreaming of achieving something bigger, those that maybe just need an extra nudge or an example of someone who looks or sounds like them to help encourage them to take the next step towards their dream.”
The launching came two weeks later than originally planned because of work to fix problems with an unspecified backup system. Like Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Bezos’ Blue Origin volunteers little in the way of technical information and no other details about the cause of the launch delay were immediately available.
But the crew took the slip in stride.
“Safety first! Grateful for the Blue Origin team and their willingness to put us first,” tweeted Echazarreta. “Can’t wait for the launch!”
She got her wish Saturday with a picture-perfect launch, the 21st for the New Shepard program and the fifth carrying passengers. Bezos took off on the first crewed mission in July 2021.
All told, Blue Origin has now launched 25 non-professionals on sub-orbital flights to the edge of space, including Bezos, his brother Mark, actor William Shatner, aviation pioneer Wally Funk, TV personality Michael Strahan and the daughter of Alan Shepard, the first American in space.
The NS-21 mission marked the ninth piloted commercial, non-government sub-orbital spaceflight in a high-stakes competition between Bezos’ Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, owned by fellow billionaire Richard Branson.
Virgin has launched four piloted flights of its winged spaceplane VSS Unity, most recently sending up Branson, two pilots and three company crewmates last July 11. All of the crew members to date have been Virgin employees.
Branson personally beat Bezos into space by a few days, but Blue Origin now appears to be well ahead in the race to turn space tourism into an operational business.
