On August 4, the New Shepard suborbital rocket sent six people to the border with space in a successful NS-22 flight. New Shepard took off from the Blue Origin site in West Texas at 9:57 a.m. EDT UTC -5 (16:57 GMT+3) and returned to Earth about 10 minutes later. Although the mission was short, the members of its crew were left with memories that they will remember for a lifetime.
NS-22 was the sixth flight with tourists into space for Blue Origin. The first, held in July 2021, sent Jeff Bezos, the company’s founder, along with his brother Mark, aviation pioneer Wally Funk and student Oliver Demen, into space. In 2021, New Shepard made two more crewed flights, and in 2022 there were three launches.
New Shepard took six space tourists on board: Coby Cotton, one of the founders of the popular YouTube channel Dude Perfect, Mario Ferreira and Sara Sabri from Portugal and Egypt, technology pioneer Clint Kelly III, head of telecommunications Steve Young and Vanessa O’Brien. After the NS-22 flight, Vanessa O’Brien even set a record: she became the first woman to reach space, climbed the world’s highest mountain Everest and descended into the deep point of the ocean, the Challenger Deep.
The flight for Cotton and Sabri was free – their seats were sponsored by the non-profit organizations MoonDAO and Space for Humanity. But Ferreira, Kelly, Young and O’Brien paid for their 10-minute journey into space themselves. But they don’t tell how much the tickets cost. Even Blue Origin does not disclose prices. For comparison, Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin’s main competitor in the suborbital space tourism industry, charges $450,000 for a seat in its VSS Unity space plane. But Virgin Galactic stopped flying altogether this year.
New Shepard is a multiple fully automated rocket-capsule combined rocket. It takes off vertically, separates the capsule with space tourists, and then returns to the landing site near the launch site. Passengers on board the capsule meet the border with space, can see the curve of the Earth against the background of the darkness of space and feel a few minutes of weightlessness.
Earlier, we reported on how a failure was detected in the New Shepard rocket systems.
According to Blue Origin
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