(ORDO NEWS) — Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital mission completed its fifth suborbital flight with a crew of six, including the first Mexican woman to fly in space and the company’s first client to fly a second time.
The New Shepard lifted off from Blue Origin’s Launch Pad 1 in West Texas at 4:25 pm ET. The capsule with six people on board landed 10 minutes after liftoff, reaching a peak altitude of about 107 kilometers. The launch vehicle had landed nearly three minutes earlier.
Among the six people on board was Blue Origin’s first repeat customer, Evan Dick, who flew the NS-19 in December 2021.
Another, Catia Echazarreta, is a former engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the first woman of Mexican descent to go into space. She was chosen to fly by Space for Humanity, a non-profit organization that offers space flights for those who cannot afford them on their own.
The crew also includes pilot Hamish Harding, Brazilian engineer Victor Correa Hespaña, who became the second Brazilian in space, businessman and adventurer Jason Robinson, and Victor Vescovo, an explorer who conquered the highest mountains in the world and dived into the deepest point of the ocean – Challenger Deep. .
At a post-flight media briefing, Dick said that his second trip on the New Shepard was “maybe a little less exciting than the first time, but it allowed me to focus a little more on the beauty of seeing the Earth from above.
” all his life,” Echazarreta said. “No one can imagine this until they experience it.”
Initially, the launch of the NS-21 mission was scheduled for May 20. However, two days before the launch, the company postponed it because the operation of an unspecified backup system on the ship “did not live up to our expectations.” Blue Origin did not provide more details about the issue or how it was resolved.
New Shepard completed its fifth human flight and second flight in 2022. In February, Bob Smith, Blue Origin’s chief executive, said he expects his company to “easily double” this year the 14 people it sent into space in 2021 on three New Shepard flights. He declined to say how many New Shepard flights, including crewed and payload-only flights, the company plans to do this year.
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