Blue Origin's fifth human spaceflight will take place next week, if all goes
according to plan.
Jeff Bezos' aerospace company announced today (May 13) that it's targeting
May 20 for the launch of NS-21, the next crewed flight of its New Shepard
suborbital vehicle. The launch window will open that day at 9:30 a.m. EDT
(1330 GMT). You can watch live here at Space.com when the time comes,
courtesy of Blue Origin; coverage will begin an hour before liftoff.
NS-21 will carry six people on a brief trip 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 news release that did not identify a target date.
Next week's mission will feature several spaceflight firsts. Echazarreta
will become the first Mexican-born person to reach space, for example, and
Dick will be the first person to fly to space with Blue Origin twice. (He
was a crewmember on NS-19, which flew on Dec. 11, 2021.)
New Shepard is a reusable rocket-capsule combo designed to carry people and
science experiments to suborbital space. Passengers on the automated vehicle
get to see Earth against the blackness of space and experience a few minutes
of weightlessness on flights that last a total of 10 to 12 minutes from
liftoff to capsule touchdown.
Blue Origin has flown four crewed New Shepard missions to date, all of them
since July 2021. NS-21 is the first in which a celebrity was never listed on
the passenger manifest. ("Saturday Night Live" star Pete Davidson was
initially supposed to fly on NS-20, but he backed out after the mission's
launch date was delayed. NS-20 was originally targeted for March 23 but
ended up flying on March 31.)
Blue Origin also revealed the NS-21 mission patch today. The patch was
designed by Dick and features nods to each of the six passengers; you can
learn more about it from Blue Origin here.
The company has one main rival in the suborbital space tourism business at
the moment — Virgin Galactic, which is part of Richard Branson's Virgin
Group. Virgin Galactic's VSS Unity space plane has four crewed spaceflights
under its belt, but it's not fully operational yet. Virgin Galactic aims to
begin commercial crewed flights early next year, after finishing maintenance
and enhancement work on Unity's carrier plane, VMS Eve.