Blue Origin tourist flight; 6 tourists went to space!

According to ISNA; The company, founded by Jeff Bezos, launched its New Shepard rocket on Thursday (Jan. 22), sending six passengers on a short trip into suborbital space.

According to Space, the flight was Blue Origin’s 17th manned flight to date and New Shepard’s 38th mission overall, which explains the flight’s name.

New Shepard lifted off at 11:25 AM ET (19:55 ISTANBUL) after a brief delay caused by “unauthorized persons in the launch area”.

The 6 people who were inside the capsule of this device were: entrepreneur and pilot Tim Drexler, retired gynecologist and obstetrician Linda Edwards; Alan Fernandez, real estate developer; Entrepreneur Alberto Gutierrez; Jim Hendren, retired US Air Force colonel and Laura Stiles, New Shepard’s launch operations manager at Blue Origin.

Stiles was added to the group at the last minute. He replaces Andrew Yaffe, who had to withdraw due to illness, but according to Blue Origin, he will fly New Shepard on an upcoming mission.

These 6 people experienced weightlessness for a few minutes and saw the earth against the blackness of space.

They also earned their “astronaut badges” because New Shepard took them through our line of work; The 62-mile (100 km) boundary is widely recognized as the beginning of outer space. Of course, there is no complete consensus on this matter; Both NASA and the US Air Force consider space to begin at an altitude of 50 miles, or 80 kilometers, above Earth. In-flight telemetry data indicated that the capsule reached an altitude of nearly 350,000 feet (106,680 meters).

The NS-38 mission ended too soon, as do all New Shepard flights. 7 minutes and 20 seconds after liftoff, the rocket returned to Earth for a guided landing and landed on its designated landing pad. The capsule also landed gently with a parachute in the West Texas desert for about three minutes.

Blue Origin has now carried 98 people into space during its 17 manned flights; The first of them took place on July 20, 2021, the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. This statistic includes 92 different people, because 6 people have boarded this capsule twice.