Blue Origin sets the date for its first crewed suborbital space trip in 21 months

Alan Boyle
·3 min read
A photo from August 2022 shows Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital spaceship sitting on its West Texas launch pad in advance of the company’s most recent crewed mission. (Blue Origin Photo)
A photo from August 2022 shows Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital spaceship sitting on its West Texas launch pad in advance of the company’s most recent crewed mission. (Blue Origin Photo)

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture has set the date for the long-delayed start of its next chapter in the history of spaceflight.

Six spacefliers are scheduled to take a trip on the company’s New Shepard suborbital spaceship, lifting off from Launch Site One in West Texas on Sunday, Blue Origin announced today. Sunday’s launch window will open at 8:30 a.m. CT (6:30 a.m. PT), and launch coverage will be streamed via BlueOrigin.com starting at T-minus-40 minutes.

As first reported last month, the crew will include retired military test pilot Ed Dwight, who lost out on a chance to become America’s first Black astronaut in the early 1960s. Dwight is now 90 years old, and the Blue Origin flight plan would put him in line to become the oldest person to take a suborbital space trip. If the launch occurs as scheduled, he would exceed the record that Star Trek actor William Shatner set in 2021 by about a month and a half.

Dwight’s flight is sponsored by two nonprofit organizations: Space for Humanity and the Seattle-based Jaison and Jamie Robinson Foundation. (Jaison Robinson, co-founder of Dream Variation Ventures, flew on a New Shepard mission in 2022.)

The other spacefliers for the NS-25 mission — the New Shepard program’s 25th flight — include venture capitalist Mason Angel, French brewery founder Sylvain Chiron, software engineer Kenneth L. Hess, retired CPA and adventure traveler Carol Schaller, and airplane pilot and entrepreneur Gopi Thotakura.

Blue Origin said the newly unveiled patch for NS-25 reflects the crew’s interests:

The NS-25 patch includes a Gemini spacecraft that represents Ed Dwight’s aerospace training era, and a starry hand that serves as a nod to his career as an artist. The sunrise represents Mason Angel’s and Carol Schaller’s desire to experience the overview effect. The mountains symbolize Carol Schaller’s, Gopi Thotakura’s and Sylvain Chiron’s passion for climbing and skiing. The crew capsule’s leaf design symbolizes the Family Tree Maker software that Kenneth L. Hess developed. (Blue Origin Graphic)

The mission is expected to follow the standard New Shepard flight plan, which starts with liftoff of the reusable, hydrogen-fueled booster and continues with crew capsule separation. The spacefliers would experience a few minutes of zero-gravity and gaze out the capsule’s picture windows — and then strap themselves back into their seats for a parachute-aided, airbag-cushioned landing. Meanwhile, the booster would land itself autonomously. The flight typically lasts about 10 minutes.

This will be Blue Origin’s first crewed mission since August 2022. New Shepard flights had to be suspended a month after that space trip due to a launch anomaly that occurred during an uncrewed research mission. After taking corrective actions — including a redesign of the booster’s engine and nozzle — Blue Origin returned New Shepard to service for an uncrewed mission last December. The success of that mission cleared the way for the resumption of crewed flights.

Blue Origin’s flight arrangements are made privately, and the company hasn’t disclosed how much its spaceflight customers are paying. Just after the first crewed flight in 2021, Jeff Bezos said the Kent, Wash.-based company was “approaching $100 million in private sales already, and demand is very, very high.”

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