Blue Origin aces another tourist mission to edge of space

New Delhi, Aug 29 (IANS) Billionaire Jeff Bezos' aerospace venture Blue Origin on Thursday yet again successfully launched six people to the edge of space and brought them back safely.

The eighth tourist mission to suborbital space carried six people for an 11-minute ride above the Karman line -- the internationally recognised boundary of space.

The crew lifted off on the New Shepard rocket a little after 8 a.m. CDT (6.30 p.m. IST) from Launch Site One in west Texas.

"Capsule touchdown. Welcome back, #NS26 crew," Blue Origin said in a post on X.com.

The six-person crew includes Nicolina Elrick, Rob Ferl, Eugene Grin, Dr. Eiman Jahangir, Karsen Kitchen, and Ephraim Rabin.

The crew experienced several minutes of weightlessness and breathtaking views of Earth before their capsule safely parachuted back to the Texas desert.

While Kitchen became the youngest woman ever to cross the Karman line, Ferl is the first NASA-funded researcher to conduct an experiment as part of a commercial suborbital space crew, the company said. Ferl’s experiment aimed to help scientists understand how plant genes react to the transition to and from microgravity.

The New Shepard programme has to date "flown 37 humans", the company said. The latest is the second this year.

The company's flights were grounded for nearly two years, after the New Shepard rocket failed an uncrewed launch in September 2022.

Earlier this year in May, Blue Origin had launched an Indian-Origin Captain Gopichand Thotakura -- the first ever from the country to tour the edge of space on Blue Origin's crewed flight mission.

Meanwhile, in direct competition with Elon Musk's SpaceX, Blue Origin is set to launch its reusable New Glenn rocket on October 13. Standing 98 metres tall, it is the largest and most powerful rocket ever built and launched. It is named after NASA astronaut John Glenn, the first American astronaut to orbit Earth, completing three orbits in 1962. Its maiden flight will carry NASA's ESCAPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers) mission. ESCAPADE aims to study the solar winds' interaction with the magnetosphere on Mars.

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