Six well-traveled adventurers are due to go where they’ve never gone before when Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture sends them on a suborbital space trip. The mission, expected to last about 10 minutes, is due for liftoff from Blue Origin’s Launch Site One in West Texas as early as 8:30 a.m. CT (6:30 a.m. PT) Saturday.
Blue Origin plans to stream coverage of the mission via its website, starting at T-minus-30 minutes.
This will be Blue Origin’s 32nd New Shepard suborbital launch, and its 12th crewed mission. The flight plan for the NS-32 mission calls for New Shepard’s booster to send the crew capsule beyond the 100-kilometer (62-mile) altitude that marks the internationally accepted boundary of space.
After separation, the reusable booster is designed to descend to a landing pad under autonomous control. Meanwhile, the spacefliers will experience a few minutes of weightlessness and get an astronaut’s-eye view of Earth beneath a black sky. At the end of the ride, the capsule will make a parachute-aided descent to the rangeland surrounding the launch site.
Since 2021, Blue Origin has flown 58 suborbital space travelers, including “Star Trek” captain William Shatner and Jeff Bezos himself. The most recent New Shepard flight, in April, sent up an all-female crew including pop superstar Katy Perry, CBS morning-show host Gayle King and Lauren Sanchez, a helicopter pilot and journalist who is Bezos’ fiancée. That mission generated celebrity buzz as well as backlash.
The lineup for the NS-32 mission includes:
- Jaime Alemán, a Panamanian attorney, business executive and former ambassador to the U.S. Blue Origin says this flight will make Alemán the first person to travel to all 193 U.N.-recognized member states, the North and South Poles and outer space.
- Gretchen Green, a radiologist specializing in women’s imaging with more than 20 years of clinical experience. She’s an alumna of Space Camp and now serves on the U.S. Space & Rocket Center Education Foundation Board.
- Paul Jeris, a real estate developer and entrepreneur based in Ohio. He has visited more than 149 countries so far and says he aims to see every nation.
- Aymette (Amy) Medina Jorge, a high-school and middle-school STEM teacher at Odyssey Academy in Galveston, Texas. She has led more than 60 space experiments and zero-gravity projects. She was born in Puerto Rico, and her seat is sponsored by Farmacias Similares, a Mexican company that’s committed to social impact and accessible health care across Latin America.
- Mark Rocket, an entrepreneur and tech leader from New Zealand. He’s the CEO of Kea Aerospace and the president of Aerospace New Zealand. He was a seed investor in Rocket Lab, where he served as co-director from 2007 to 2011.
- Jesse Williams, a Canadian entrepreneur and adventurer who has reached the summits of six of the seven highest peaks on Earth, including Mount Everest and Antarctica’s Mount Vinson.
Saturday’s scheduled launch could be delayed due to weather concerns or technical issues. We’ll be updating this report with further developments. Blue Origin is also providing online updates
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