Blue Origin set a brand new report on its newest area tourism flight.
That mission, referred to as NS-26, despatched six folks to suborbital area and again this morning (Aug. 29) from Blue Origin’s West Texas spaceport, reaching a most altitude of 64.6 miles (104 kilometers) above floor degree.
Considered one of them was Karsen Kitchen, a 21-year-old pupil on the College of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). In line with Blue Origin, Kitchen is the youngest girl ever to cross the Kármán line, the 62-mile-high (100 km) boundary that many individuals regard as the beginning of outer area.
Kitchen has some area connections and aspirations: She’s interning with Blue Origin, in keeping with ChapelBoro.com. And her dad, Jim, a enterprise professor at UNC, flew on the corporate’s NS-20 mission in March 2022.
Blue Origin additionally launched the youngest man — and youngest particular person, interval — past the Kármán line: 18-year-old Dutch pupil Oliver Daemen.
Associated: The Kármán Line: The place does area start?
Jeff Bezos’ firm notched that milestone on its very first crewed flight, which occurred on July 20, 2021. That mission additionally carried Bezos, his brother Mark and 82-year-old aviation pioneer Wally Funk to the ultimate frontier.
As its identify suggests, NS-26 was the twenty sixth general flight of New Shepard, Blue Origin’s reusable suborbital automobile. Eight of these missions have been crewed; the remainder have been robotic analysis flights.
The Kármán line, by the best way, isn’t the one acknowledged space-delineation marker; Each NASA and the U.S. navy award astronaut wings to anybody who will get at the very least 50 miles (80 km) above Earth’s floor.
And, by this metric, Kitchen isn’t the youngest girl to achieve area. Eighteen-year-old Anastatia Mayers and her crewmates reached a peak altitude of 55 miles (88.5 km) on a flight with Virgin Galactic in August 2023.
Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin’s chief competitor within the suborbital tourism trade, at present costs $450,000 per seat. Blue Origin has not revealed its ticket costs.
