Blue Origin launched its 15th space tourism flight today (Oct. 8), sending six people on a brief trip to the final frontier, including a mystery passenger who only revealed his identity after the flight.
The company’s New Shepard vehicle lifted off from Blue Origin’s West Texas launch site today at 9:40 a.m. EDT (1340 GMT; 8:40 a.m. local Texas time), kicking off a suborbital flight known as NS-36.
Everything went according to plan for Blue Origin. New Shepard’s first stage came back to Earth for a vertical, powered landing about 8 minutes after launch, and the autonomous vehicle’s capsule followed suit several minutes later, touching down under parachutes in the Texas desert.
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Flying on that capsule were franchise-industry executive Jeff Elgin, media entrepreneur Danna Karagussova, electrical engineer Clint Kelly III, software entrepreneur and author Aaron Newman, and Ukrainian businessman and investor Vitalii Ostrovsky.
“Oh my God, oh my God!” Karagussova could be heard exclaiming as they reached space. She and her crewmates had dubbed themselves the “Space Nomads” for the flight, as each Blue Origin crew picks its own nickname, the company said.
There was also a sixth mystery passenger, who wanted to remain anonymous until after the flight.
That mystery space tourist was Will Lewis, CEO and chair of the medical biotech company Insmed. “He is an experienced adventurer and considers NS-36 to be the fulfillment of a lifelong dream,” Blue Origin spokesperson Tabitha Lipkin said during live commentary.
NS-36 was the second spaceflight for Kelly, who performed pioneering robotics and computer-science research in the 1980s at the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). He also went to space on Blue Origin’s NS-22 mission in August 2022.
You can read more about each NS-36 passenger in our crew reveal story.
Blue Origin, which was founded by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, has been flying New Shepard for a decade now.
As its name suggests, today’s flight was the 36th overall for the reusable vehicle. It was just the 15th to carry people, however; most New Shepard jaunts have been uncrewed research flights.
New Shepard gets more than 62 miles (100 kilometers) above Earth — higher than the Kármán line, the widely recognized boundary of outer space. Passengers experience a few minutes of weightlessness and get to see Earth against the blackness of space.
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Blue Origin said the NS-36 space tourists reached a maximum altitude of about 66 miles (107 kilometers), just above the Kármán line during their flight. From liftoff to landing, the entire mission lasted 10 minutes and 21 seconds.
Blue Origin has not revealed its New Shepard ticket prices. But, for some perspective: The company’s biggest competitor in the suborbital tourism business, Virgin Galactic, charged $600,000 per seat for its most recent flights.
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