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Blue Origin is back in the space tourism game. Jeff Bezos’ spaceflight company successfully flew six paying customers to the edge of space and back this morning, breaking a nearly two-year hiatus in human missions. This will be the seventh time Blue Origin has sailed with humans on board. The mission took off from the company’s Launch Site 1 in West Texas just after 10:30 a.m. ET on a jaunt across the Karman Line, or space boundary, about 92 miles above Earth.
The six people in the New Shepard crew capsule included 90-year-old Ed Dwight. He is a former Air Force captain and was the first black astronaut candidate when he was selected for the training program in 1961. Although he trained, he ultimately did not become an astronaut. Although he was selected to join NASA’s astronaut corps, he had never been to space before. Also in attendance were Mason Angell, Sylvain Chiron, Kenneth L. Hess, Carol Schaller, and Gopi Sotak. They were able to temporarily remove their seatbelts and experience weightlessness.
The crew safely returned to the ground about 10 minutes after liftoff. One of his three parachutes in the capsule did not deploy properly on the return trip, but there were no problems with the landing, thanks to the redundancy of the system to take into account exactly such situations.
This was also the 25th mission of the New Shepard rocket. It last flew with a crew in August 2022, but suffered a structural failure in its engine nozzle during the launch of a payload mission the following month and did not fly again until December 2023. It then returned to flight and conducted another payload mission. Today’s launch will be the first time in almost two years that a spacecraft will carry human passengers.