All the news about Blue Origin’s first crewed flight since 2022
By: Wes Davis Posted: May 20, 2024

Jeff Bezos’ space tourism company flew humans to space for the first time since 2022.

Blue Origin carried out its first crewed launch since 2022 on May 19th, sending six space tourists into space for a brief period of weightlessness. The New Shepard rocket took off at about an hour after its 9:30AM ET launch window started and passed the Kármán line — the 62-mile-high line that separates the Earth’s atmosphere from space — about three and a half minutes later, reaching a peak of about 347,000 feet high less than a minute after that.

One of NS-25’s passengers was Ed Dwight, who, with the backing of President John F. Kennedy’s administration, trained for NASA’s space program in the early 1960s, but wasn’t ultimately selected to become an astronaut. His seat on NS-25 was sponsored by the nonprofit Space for Humanity.

The five other passengers on the flight were Mason Angel, Sylvain Chiron, Kenneth L. Hess, Carol Schaller, and Gopi Thotakura.

This was Blue Origin’s seventh crewed flight. Blue Origin paused its space tourism flights in 2022 after a booster malfunctioned on an uncrewed flight in September that year, prompting the Federal Aviation Administration to investigate the failure and require it to carry out 21 corrective actions.

Correction May 19th: This article previously said this is Blue Origin’s sixth crewed mission, but in fact, it’s the seventh. That has been corrected, as has the spelling of Ed Dwight’s name.

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