by Blue Origin’s fifth manned spaceflight will take place next week, if all goes according to plan.
Jeff Bezos’ aerospace company announced today (May 13) that it is targeting the May 20 launch of NS-21, the next manned flight of its New Shepard suborbital vehicle. The launch window will open at 9:30 AM EDT (1330 GMT) that day. You can watch live here on Space.com when the time comes, courtesy of Blue Origin; coverage begins one hour before launch.
NS-21 will carry six people on a short journey to the final frontier – Evan Dick, Katya Echazarreta, Hamish Harding, Victor Correa Hespanha, Jaison Robinson and Victor Vescovo. Blue origin announced their names on Monday (May 9) in a press release that did not identify a target date.
Jeff Bezos: Blue Origin and Founder of Amazon
Next week’s mission will feature several firsts for spaceflight. For example, Echazarreta will become the first Mexican-born person to reach space, and Dick will be the first person to fly into space twice with Blue Origin. (He was a crew member on NS-19, which flew on December 11, 2021.)
New Shepard is a reusable rocket-capsule combo designed to transport humans and science experiments into suborbital space. Passengers of the automated vehicle get to see Earth against the blackness of space and experience a few minutes of weightlessness on flights lasting a total of 10 to 12 minutes from launch to capsule landing.
Blue Origin has flown four crewed New Shepard missions to date, all since July 2021. NS-21 is the first in which a celebrity is never listed on the passenger manifest. (“Saturday Night Live” star Pete Davidson was initially supposed to fly on NS-20, but he withdrew after the mission’s launch date was postponed. NS-20 was originally intended for March 23, but eventually flew on March 31.)
Blue Origin also unveiled the NS-21 mission patch today. The patch was designed by Dick and has a nod to each of the six passengers; you can learn more about it from Blue Origin here†
The company currently has one major competitor in the suborbital space tourism business: Virgo Galactic, which is part of Richard Branson’s Virgin Group. Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity spaceplane has four manned space flights under its belt, but it’s not yet fully operational. Virgin Galactic aims to: early next year with commercial manned flightsafter completing maintenance and improvement work on Unity’s aircraft carrier, VMS Eve.
Mike Wall is the author of “Outside(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book on the search for extraterrestrial life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall† follow us on twitter @Spacedotcom or on facebook†
