The company of Jeff Bezos Blue Origin sent the first Egyptian and the first Portuguese in space, during a journey of regarding ten minutes aboard the New Shepard rocket. The crew included a total of six space tourists, having paid a secret price.
The takeoff took place Thursday from West Texas. The capsule, once propelled by a launcher, reached more than 100 kilometers in altitude before descending towards Earth, slowed down by parachutes in order to land gently in the desert.
Up there, passengers can experience weightlessness by detaching themselves from their seat for a few moments, and see the curvature of the Earth through large portholes.
‘I’m floating!’ exclaimed a passenger on board. ‘Look at that black!’, quipped another, on a live broadcast of the flight.
It was the sixth successful space tourism flight for Blue Origin in just over a year, with the first taking place in late July 2021, with Jeff Bezos himself on board.
The Egyptian Sara Sabry, engineer and founder of an association aiming to promote space research, was sponsored by the ‘Space for Humanity’ programme, the aim of which is to democratize access to space.
Mario Ferreira, a Portuguese entrepreneur who notably participated in the Dakar rally, was also part of the trip.
Record Guinness
With this flight, the American-British Vanessa O’Brien also became the first woman to win a Guinness record granted to those having rubbed shoulders with extreme conditions on Earth (she climbed Mount Everest), in the water (to the deepest point Challenger Deep) and in the air, crossing the boundary of space.
The crew was completed by the co-founder of a famous Youtube channel, Coby Cotton, the businessman Steve Young, and Clint Kelly III, who worked for a Pentagon agency where he led a development project self-driving cars.
Blue Origin’s main competitor for this type of suborbital flight is Virgin Galactic. But since July 2021 and the flight of its founder, the Briton Richard Branson, this ship has remained grounded to undergo modifications.
/ATS