Six well-traveled adventurers rode Blue Origin’s suborbital rocket ship to go where they’ve never gone before: the edge of space. The New Shepard rocket lifted off from the Kent, Wash.-based company’s Launch Site One in West Texas at 8:39 a.m. CT (6:39 a.m. PT) today for a 10-minute mission.
This was Blue Origin’s 32nd New Shepard suborbital launch and its 12th crewed mission. New Shepard’s booster sent the crew capsule to a height of about 104 kilometers (64.4 miles, or 340,290 feet) — just beyond the 100-kilometer (62-mile) altitude that marks the internationally accepted boundary of space.
After separation, the reusable booster descended to a landing pad under autonomous control. Meanwhile, the spacefliers experienced a few minutes of weightlessness and got an astronaut’s-eye view of Earth beneath a black sky. At the end of the ride, the capsule made a parachute-aided descent to the rangeland surrounding the launch site.
Since 2021, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture has flown 64 suborbital space travelers, including “Star Trek” captain William Shatner and Bezos himself. A previous 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 included:
- Jaime Alemán, a Panamanian attorney, business executive and former ambassador to the U.S. Blue Origin said this flight made 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. “You guys, we did it!” he said after touchdown.
- 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.
In addition to the travelers, Blue Origin’s crew capsule carried more than 1,000 postcards that were sent in by students as part of an educational campaign organized by the Club for the Future, the company’s nonprofit foundation.
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