The crew of Blue Origin’s NS-26 mission is pictured during a training session prior to Thursday’s successful suborbital flight — the eighth human flight and 26th overall in the space tourism company’s New Shepard program. Photo courtesy Blue Origin
Aug. 29 (UPI) — Jeff Bezos’ space tourism venture Blue Origin on Thursday successfully completed its eighth human suborbital spaceflight and the 26th flight in its New Shepard program. A crew including Nicolina Elrick, Rob Ferl, Eugene Grin, Dr. Eiman Jahangir, Karsen Kitchen and Ephraim Rabin touched down in the reusable RSS First Step capsule at Blue Origin’s Corn Ranch spaceport in West Texas at 9:07 a.m. EDT, 12 minutes after takeoff. Advertisement
During the flight, the crew of the NS-26 mission reached a maximum altitude of about 341,000 feet and experienced weightlessness for about 1 minute.
The company noted that, at age 21, Kitchen made history Thursday as the youngest woman ever to cross the Kármán line — the boundary separating Earth’s atmosphere and outer space. She is a student at the University of North Carolina who has conducted research in radio astronomy at the Green Bank Observatory.
In another accomplishment for the New Shepard program Thursday, Ferl became the first NASA-funded researcher to conduct an experiment, or
Blue Origin successfully completes 8th manned New Shepard space tourism flight
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