Blue Origin’s sixth manned spaceflight is in the books.
The firms New shepherd The suborbital vehicle carried six people to the final frontier this morning (August 4), including some who were first-timers to spaceflight.
New Shepard took off Blue Origins West Texas location at 9:57 am EDT (1357 GMT) and was back on Earth about 10 minutes later. Though the mission was brief, the crew members walked away with memories that will last a lifetime.
“Woo-hoo! We’re not going to die. Our poor families,” joked one of the passengers as the New Shepard craft descended safely under its parachutes into the Texas desert.
On photos: Blue Origin’s first New Shepard passenger launch starring Jeff Bezos
The six people on board were Coby Cotton, one of the founders of the popular YouTube channel Dude Perfect; Mário Ferreira and Sara Sabry, the first people to reach space from Portugal and Egypt respectively; technology pioneer Clint Kelly III; Telecoms executive (non-former NFL quarterback) Steve Young; and Vanessa O’Brien.
NS-22, according to a, made O’Brien the first woman to complete the “extreme trifecta of explorers”. Blue Origin mission brief (opens in new tab). She has now reached space, climbed the highest mountain in the world (Mt. Everest) and descended to the deepest point in the ocean (the Pacific’s Challenger Deep).
Cotton and Sabry didn’t have to pay for their ride today; Their seats were sponsored by nonprofit organizations MoonDAO and Space for Humanity, respectively.
MoonDAO aims to decentralize access to space, with the long-term goal of “creating a self-sustaining, self-governing colony on the moon that will serve as a launching pad for humanity to explore the cosmos.” to the organization’s website (opens in new tab). Cotton won a MoonDAO contest to board the NS-22.
space for humanity (opens in new tab) works to improve our species’ access to space. Part of the organization’s strategy includes sponsoring “citizen-astronauts,” a group of extraordinary people who will do their best to share with those of us who have never left Earth the life-changing shift in perspective that spaceflight brings brings. Sabry is the second citizen astronaut to fly Blue Origin, after Katya Echazarreta, a crew member launched on NS-21 in June.
Ferreira, Kelly, Young and O’Brien apparently paid their own way into space today. But it’s unclear how much they had to shell out; Blue Origin has not announced ticket prices for New Shepard. Compare Richard Branson’s Virgo Galactic, Blue Origin’s main competitor in the suborbital space tourism industry, is currently charging $450,000 for a seat on its VSS Unity spaceplane. (VSS Unity has gone into space four times, but is not yet fully operational.)
You can read more about all six of today’s spaceplanes in our The history of the NS-22 crew members.
NS-22 was the sixth manned spaceflight for Blue Origin. The first company founder, seconded in July 2021 jeff bezos together with his brother Mark, the aviation pioneer Wally Funk and the student Oliver Daemen. New Shepard flew two more crewed flights in 2021 and has now flown three of those in 2022.
New Shepard is a reusable, fully automatic missile-capsule combo. The rocket returns to Earth for a vertical landing near the launch site, and the capsule lands under parachutes shortly after. Passengers aboard the vehicle can see the curve of the earth against the blackness of space and experience a few minutes of it weightlessness.
Mike Wall is the author of “Out there (opens in new tab)(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for extraterrestrial life. Follow him on Twitter @michaelwall (opens in new tab). Follow us on Twitter @spacedotcom (opens in new tab) or on Facebook (opens in new tab).