Blue Origin has made its first crewed launch since a rocket disaster in 2022, leaving rival Virgin Galactic as the sole operator in the nascent suborbital tourism market.
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Blue Origin has made its first crewed launch since a rocket disaster in 2022, leaving rival Virgin Galactic as the sole operator in the nascent suborbital tourism market.
After a nearly two-year hiatus, Blue Origin sent adventurers into space on Sunday, including a former Air Force pilot who decades ago was denied the chance to become the first black U.S. astronaut.
It was the first crewed launch for the venture, owned and founded by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, since a 2022 rocket disaster left rival Virgin Galactic as the sole operator in the nascent suborbital tourism market.
Six people, including sculptor Ed Dwight, who was on track to become NASA’s first astronaut of color in the 1960s before he was rejected, launched at around 09:36 a.m. local time (1436 GMT) from the base Launch Site One in west Texas. the live feed showed.
Dwight — at 90 years, 8 months and 10 days — became the oldest person ever to go into space.
“It’s a life-changing experience, everyone should do it,” he exclaimed after the flight.
“I thought I didn’t really need that in my life,” he added, reflecting on not joining the astronaut corps, his first failure as a young man. “But I lied,” he said with a hearty laugh.
The NS-25 mission is the seventh human flight for Blue Origin, which sees short jaunts on the New Shepard suborbital vehicle as a stepping stone to bigger ambitions, including the development of a full-fledged heavy rocket and lunar lander.
Including the crew on Sunday, the company sent 37 people aboard New Shepard, a small, fully reusable rocket system named after Alan Shepard, the first American in space.
One of the Blue Origin capsule’s three parachutes failed to fully inflate, possibly leading to a harder-than-expected landing.
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One of the Blue Origin capsule’s three parachutes failed to fully inflate, possibly leading to a harder-than-expected landing.
The second is a minor
The program suffered a setback when the New Shepard rocket caught fire shortly after launch on September 12, 2022, even though the uncrewed capsule ejected safely.
A federal investigation determined that an overheating engine nozzle was to blame. In December 2023, Blue Origin took corrective action and conducted a successful unmanned launch, paving the way for Sunday’s mission.
After liftoff, the sleek and capacious capsule separated from the launch vehicle, which ensures zero carbon dioxide emissions. The rocket made a precise vertical landing.
When the spacecraft flew past the Karman Line, the internationally recognized limit of space at 62 miles (100 kilometers) above sea level, passengers had the opportunity to marvel at the curvature of the Earth and unbuckle their seat belts to float — or somersault — for several minutes of weightlessness.
The capsule then re-entered the atmosphere, deploying its parachutes for a desert landing in a layer of sand. However, one of the three parachutes did not fully inflate, which may have resulted in a harder than expected landing.
When asked for comment, a Blue Origin spokesman emphasized that its system was designed with multiple fail-safes in place. “The capsule is designed to land safely with one parachute. Overall, the mission was a success and all our astronauts are very excited to be back.”
In general, the flight lasted about 11 minutes.
Bezos himself was on the program’s first-ever crewed flight in 2021. A few months later, Star Trek’s William Shatner blurred the line between science fiction and reality when he became the world’s oldest astronaut at age 90, decades after he first played a space traveler.
“It’s a life-changing experience, everyone should do it,” exclaimed Ed Dwight after his Blue Origin space flight.
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“It’s a life-changing experience, everyone should do it,” exclaimed Ed Dwight after his Blue Origin space flight.
In space, finally
Dwight, who was almost two months older than Shatner at the time of the flight, became only the second minor to venture beyond Earth.
Astronaut John Glenn remains the oldest person to orbit the planet, a feat he accomplished in 1998 at the age of 77 aboard the space shuttle Discovery.
Sunday’s mission finally gave Dwight the chance he had been denied decades earlier.
He was an elite test pilot when he was nominated by President John F. Kennedy to join the highly competitive Air Force program known as the Astronaut Pathway, but ultimately was not selected.
He left the Army in 1966, citing racial politics, before devoting his life to telling black history through sculpture. His art, exhibited across the country, includes such iconic figures as Martin Luther King Jr., Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman and others.