Blue Origin’s New Shepard flies toward space carrying Good Morning America co-anchor Michael Strahan, Laura Shepard Churchley, daughter of astronaut Alan Shepard, and four other civilians on December 11, 2021 near Van Horn, Texas. The six are riding aboard mission NS-19, the third human spaceflight for the company which is owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
(Image credit: Mario Tama/Getty Images)
Blue Origin plans to launch its first private space tourist mission in nearly two years on Sunday (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.
Related: Blue Origin will launch Ed Dwight, the 1st-ever Black astronaut candidate, to space on next New Shepard rocket flight
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.
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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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Elizabeth Howell (she/her), Ph.D., is a staff writer in the spaceflight channel since 2022 covering diversity, education and gaming as well. She was contributing writer for Space.com for 10 years before joining full-time. Elizabeth’s reporting includes multiple exclusives with the White House and Office of the Vice-President of the United States, an exclusive conversation with aspiring space tourist (and NSYNC bassist) Lance Bass, speaking several times with the International Space Station, witnessing five human spaceflight launches on two continents, flying parabolic, working inside a spacesuit, and participating in a simulated Mars mission. Her latest book, “Why Am I Taller?”, is co-written with astronaut Dave Williams. Elizabeth holds a Ph.D. and M.Sc. in Space Studies from the University of North Dakota, a Bachelor of Journalism from Canada’s Carleton University and a Bachelor of History from Canada’s Athabasca University. Elizabeth is also a post-secondary instructor in communications and science at several institutions since 2015; her experience includes developing and teaching an astronomy course at Canada’s Algonquin College (with Indigenous content as well) to more than 1,000 students since 2020. Elizabeth first got interested in space after watching the movie Apollo 13 in 1996, and still wants to be an astronaut someday. Mastodon: https://qoto.org/@howellspace
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