The crewmembers for NS-26, Blue Origin’s next suborbital space tourism mission. A launch date has not yet been announced.
Blue Origin has announced the crew for its next New Shepard space tourism flight.
The diverse crew includes a NASA-funded researcher, a professor, a university student, a cardiologist and entrepreneurs, Blue Origin announced in a statement on Wednesday (July 24).
The announcement signals that Blue Origin is ready to resume flights, having tackled an issue that saw the capsule on its previous crewed flight — NS-25 this past May — touch down using just two of its three parachutes.
The upcoming NS-26 mission will carry Nicolina Elrick, Rob Ferl, Eugene Grin, Dr. Eiman Jahangir, Karsen Kitchen and Ephraim Rabin.
Elrick is a philanthropist and entrepreneur, while Ferl is a professor and director at the University of Florida’s Astraeus Space Institute. Grin was born in Ukraine and emigrated to the US in 1979, forging a career in real estate and finance. Jahangir is a cardiologist and associate professor at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, and Rabin is an American-Israeli businessman, philanthropist and entrepreneur.
Kitchen, a senior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, will become the youngest woman ever to cross the Kármán line , according to the statement. The Kármán line, at 62 miles (100 kilometers) in altitude, is a commonly used definition of the boundary for where space begins.
But it’s not the only one ; NASA and the U.S. military, for example, award astronaut wings to anyone who gets above 50 miles (80 km). Eighteen-year-old Anastatia Mayers is the youngest person to reach space by that definition, getting 55 miles (88.5 km) up during a Virgin Galactic flight in August 2023 .
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Blue Origin, owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos , did not reveal a date for the upcoming launch. The mission will, however, be the second New Shepard flight this year.
The company’s space tourism launches had halted in fall 2022 after the NS-23 uncrewed research mission suffered a serious anomaly. This was determined to be caused by a
Next Blue Origin space tourism flight will launch youngest woman above the Kármán line
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