Blue Origin and its all-female mission: Fast facts
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin is launching its New Shepard rocket featuring an all-female six-person crew later Monday morning.
The mission will mark Blue Origin’s 11th flight with humans onboard.
The aerospace company is aiming for its New Shepard rocket to lift off at 9:30 a.m. ET.
The Blue Shepard rocket, launching from Blue Origin’s Launch Site One in Texas, is a "fully reusable, suborbital rocket system," Blue Origin says on its website.
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During the flight, the six astronauts will travel above the Karman Line in a capsule and have a brief period of weightlessness before coming back to Earth, according to the company. The Karman Line, 62 miles above Earth, demarcates the edge of space.
The entire flight is expected to span about 11 minutes.
Blue Origin is providing a live webcast of the mission that is slated to start at 8 a.m. ET.
Six women make up the crew for Blue Origin’s NS-31 mission: STEMBoard CEO Aisha Bowe; bioastronautics research scientist Amanda Nguyen; "CBS Mornings" co-host Gayle King; musician Katy Perry; film producer Kerianne Flynn; and Bezos Earth Fund Vice Chair Lauren Sanchez. Sanchez is also Bezos’ fiancée.
Bezos created Blue Origin about 25 years ago.
The company has conducted 10 human flights with New Shepard since 2021, with its 10th occurring in late February. Its Blue Shepard program has 30 flights total under its belt, according to Blue Origin.
Blue Origin has also been creating a two-stage New Glenn rocket, which achieved its first launch in mid-January.
The company has described the rocket as crucial to its "efforts to establish sustained human presence on the Moon, harness in-space resources, provide multi-mission, multi-orbit mobility through Blue Ring, and establish destinations in low Earth orbit."
Blue Origin and its New Glenn rocket on April 4 landed a nearly $2.4 billion National Security Space Launch Phase 3 Lane 2 contract earlier in April for seven missions, adding to two other "national security launch-related" contracts it has previously received, according to a press release.
The company was also tapped by NASA in 2023 for building a lunar lander.
BLUE ORIGIN TO LAY OFF ABOUT 10% OF WORKFORCE
It will do so for NASA’s Artemis V mission with its national partners as part of a NextSTEP-2 Appendix P Sustaining Lunar Development contract it won. The contract, valued at over $3.4 billion, covers the design, development, testing and two demonstration missions with the Washington-based company’s Blue Moon lander, a NASA press release said at the time.
Blue Origin competes with SpaceX, which tech billionaire Elon Musk helms, in the space business.
Blue Origin’s first human flight took place in July 2021. Bezos, his brother, Mark Bezos, aviator Wally Funk and then-18-year-old Oliver Daemen participated in that mission.
"There are no words, it was a perfect mission," Bezos told MSNBC after the flight. "I’m not talented enough to put this into words: the accelerating G-forces and how that felt, your skin pulled back and pushed into the seat, and then zero-G comes so suddenly, and then you’re just floating."