Blue Origin plans to launch its first private space tourist mission in nearly two years today (May 19), and you can watch it live online.
The mission is known as NS-25, because it will be the 25th to date for Blue Origin‘s New Shepard suborbital vehicle. Six people will participate: Ed Dwight, the U.S.’s first-ever Black astronaut candidate; venture capitalist Mason Angel; Sylvain Chiron, the founder of French craft brewery Brasserie Mont Blanc; entrepreneur Kenneth L. Hess; retired accountant Carol Schaller; and pilot and aviator Gopi Thotakura. You can read more about each of them here.
The launch window for NS-25 opens at 9:30 a.m. EDT (1330 GMT; 8:30 a.m. local time in West Texas, where the launch will take place). Space.com will carry Blue Origin’s webcast on this page and on our home page; the stream is scheduled to begin 40 minutes before the launch window opens.
The last crewed Blue Origin flight, NS-22, happened in August 2022. Then, a month later during an uncrewed research mission, New Shepard suffered an anomaly. The first-stage booster was destroyed, but vehicle’s capsule came back safely under parachutes.
New Shepard flights were suspended as engineers examined and addressed the anomaly, which was a “thermo-structural failure” of the nozzle on the rocket’s single BE-3PM engine. Suborbital flights resumed in December 2023 with the uncrewed NS-24 mission.
New Shepard is reusable, with the rocket touching down vertically shortly after liftoff, and the capsule (with passengers) coming down under parachutes roughly 11 minutes after liftoff.
Passengers experience a few minutes of weightlessness and get to see Earth against the blackness of space. Prices for New Shepard flights have not been released, but competitor Virgin Galactic’s seats start at $450,000 apiece.
NS-25 will be the seventh crewed New Shepard flight. The vehicle’s other 18 missions have been robotic research efforts.
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