Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin unveils crew for 10th space tourism launch
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We now know who's flying on Blue Origin's next suborbital space tourism mission — most of them, anyway.
That mission is known as NS-30, because it will be the 30th overall launch of Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket-capsule combo. It will be the 10th crewed flight for the company, which was established in 2000 by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
NS-30 will lift off from Blue Origin's West Texas launch site at an as-yet unspecified date. It will carry six people on a brief trip to and from suborbital space, and the company just revealed who five of them are.
Those crewmates are Lane Bess, Jesús Calleja, Elaine Chia Hyde, Richard Scott and Tushar Shah, Blue Origin announced in an update on Tuesday (Feb. 18).
Related: Blue Origin crew, including history's 100th woman to fly to space, lands safely (video)
Bess is the principal and founder of Bess Ventures and Advisory, a venture capital firm based in Florida. NS-30 will be his second ride with Blue Origin; he also flew on the NS-19 mission in December 2021. (Three other people have also flown on New Shepard two times.)
Calleja is a Spanish TV host, pilot and mountaineer whose "adventures have taken him to every corner of the world, including the Seven Summits, the North and South Poles, and numerous deserts, active volcanoes and ancient sinkholes," Blue Origin wrote in Tuesday's update.
Chia Hyde is an entrepreneur, physicist and pilot who was born in Singapore, grew up in Australia and now lives in Florida. Scott is a reproductive endocrinologist who works as an adjunct professor at the medical schools of Yale University and the University of South Carolina (Greenville), and Shah is a partner at a hedge fund in New York City.
You can learn more about these five folks in Blue Origin's update. That update mentions "an undisclosed sixth crew member," whose name we will presumably learn at some point.
RELATED STORIES:
— Facts about New Shepard, Blue Origin's rocket for space tourism
— In photos: William Shatner launches to space on Blue Origin's New Shepard
— Blue Origin launches Michael Strahan and crew of 5 on record-setting suborbital spaceflight
New Shepard flights last 10 to 12 minutes from liftoff to the parachute-aided touchdown of the reusable vehicle's capsule. Passengers get to experience a few minutes of weightless and see Earth against the blackness of space. Blue Origin has not revealed how much it charges for this experience.
The first crewed New Shepard flight took place on July 20, 2021, the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Bezos flew on that landmark Blue Origin mission, along with his brother Mark, aviation pioneer Wally Funk and Dutch student Oliver Daemen.
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