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Going boldly where Jeff Bezos has gone before.
William Shatner, best known as Captain James T. Kirk of the USS Enterprise in the “Star Trek” TV and movie series, will venture to the edge of space this month in New Shepard. This is the tourist rocket built by the private space company Blue Origin, owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
“So now I can say something. Yes that’s true; I’m going to be a ‘rocket man!’,” Mr. Shatner wrote the news on Twitter.
The flight is scheduled for October 12, and two more paying customers will join Mr. Shatner: Chris Boshuizen, co-founder of satellite imagery firm Planet Labs, and Glen de Vries, co-founder of clinical research. software Medidata. The mission’s fourth passenger will be Audrey Powers, vice president of Blue Origin.
The company launched First passenger crew into space in July. The crew of this mission is Mr. Bezos, his brother Mark Bezos, Wally FunkAn 82-year-old pilot and 18-year-old Dutch student who was denied a chance to become an astronaut in the 1960s because of her gender. Ms. Funk, 82, currently holds the record for the oldest passenger in space.
From Blue Origin’s pad in West Texas, the 16-deck rocket will launch to an altitude of about 63 miles, releasing the gum-shaped crew capsule. Passengers experience weightlessness in microgravity for about four minutes. The New Shepard booster will return to Earth for a vertical landing a few miles from where it was launched, and the crew capsule will fall under a series of parachutes minutes later.
The flight will not reach orbit, which requires a much more powerful rocket that lifts a spacecraft to a much higher altitude.
Blue Origin’s New Shepard vehicle is at the heart of the space tourism business, and Mr. Bezos said over $100 million in tickets have already been booked. The company did not disclose ticket prices, but instead reserved seats privately. Sales of the company’s space tourism rival, Virgin Galactic Seats in a suborbital space plane starting at $450,000.
The quest will come at a busy time for Blue Origin. 21 current and former employees last week the company said in a post Talking about safety issues with the New Shepard rocket is full of condescension and sexism. Blue Origin disputes the allegationsHe said the company has an internal hotline for sexual harassment complaints and that New Shepard is “the safest spacecraft ever designed or built”.
Mr de Vries, one of the passengers who will join Mr Shatner at the top of New Shepard, said last week that he was not worried about the content of the article. “I trust Blue Origin’s safety program, spacecraft and track record, and I certainly wouldn’t be flying with them if I didn’t.” said last week.
The company has other challenges, including sparring with NASA in federal court later on. Losing a major contract to SpaceX, the company founded by Elon Musk to build a lander to return astronauts to the moon. Development of an engine to power larger rockets, including one made by the Boeing-Lockheed Martin initiative United Launch Alliance, is about a year behind schedule.
New Shepard is one of a handful of spacecraft offering trips to space for wealthy travelers in the burgeoning space tourism industry. SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule, developed primarily to fly government astronauts to the International Space Station, flew its first private tourist crew in September and has more special missions lined up for next year. Virgin Galactic, which flew founder Richard Branson and other passengers into space in July, plans to open its commercial space tourism business next year, eliminating the backlog of nearly 600 ticket holders. Its next flight with Italian Air Force officers and researchers is expected this month.
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