Today, May 19, Blue Origin will launch its first private space tourist mission in almost two years, which you can watch live online.
The reason the mission is called NS-25 is that Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital vehicle will be performing its 25th mission to date. The first-ever Black astronaut candidate from the United States, Ed Dwight, venture capitalist Mason Angel, Sylvain Chiron, the founder of Brasserie Mont Blanc, a French artisan brewery, entrepreneur Kenneth L. Hess, retired accountant Carol Schaller, and pilot and aviator Gopi Thotakura are the six participants. More information about each of them is available here.
NS-25’s launch window begins at 9:30 a.m. EDT (1330 GMT); in West Texas, where the launch is scheduled to occur, it opens at 8:30 a.m. local time. Blue Origin’s webcast will be available on Space.com on both this page and our home page; the stream is set to start forty minutes prior to the launch window opening.
August 2022 saw the last crewed Blue Origin flight, NS-22. Then, a month later, New Shepard experienced an abnormality while on an unmanned research mission. Despite the destruction of the first-stage rocket, the vehicle’s capsule returned safely using its parachutes.
Engineers investigated and resolved the anomaly, which was a “thermo-structural failure” of the nozzle of the rocket’s single BE-3PM engine, halting further Shepard missions. December 2023 saw the return of suborbital flights with the unmanned NS-24 mission.
Reusable, New Shepard descends vertically shortly after takeoff, and the capsule—carrying passengers—descends under parachute about eleven minutes later.
For a brief period, travelers feel as though they are weightless and observe Earth against the backdrop of space. Although the cost of the New Shepard flights is unknown, tickets on Virgin Galactic, a rival airline, start at $450,000 each.
The seventh crewed New Shepard flight will be NS-25. The next eighteen missions of the vehicle were dedicated to robotic research.