WASHINGTON: Blue Origin flew its first space shuttle on Sunday for the first time in two years, increasing competition in the space tourism market after a rocket malfunction halted crew operations.
The six men, including Ed Dwight, a controversial black sculptor and former Air Force pilot who was recruited by NASA’s astronaut corps in the 1960s, will blast off from a company launch site in west Texas around 8:30 am local time (1330 GMT). .
At 90 years, 8 months and 10 days, Dwight will become the oldest man in space in 2021, passing Star Trek actor William Shatner, who was nearly two months younger when he launched Blue Origin.
The NS-25 mission is the seventh manned flight for the company, which is owned and founded by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, and is a short launch on the New Shepard suborbital vehicle to greater ambitions, including the development of a complete rocket and lunar. landing
French businessman Sylvain Chiron, one of the crew, told AFP he was thrilled by “the feeling of leaving the human world and seeing the whole Earth from above, without limits, in all its vulnerability and beauty”.
To date, Blue Origin has flown 31 people aboard New Shepard – a small, fully operational rocket system named after Alan Shepard, the first American in space.
