Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin completed a suborbital joyride Saturday with a six-person crew, including the first wheelchair user to reach space and one of SpaceX’s first engineers.
The flight took off at about 15:15 Luxembourg time, and the capsule landed roughly 11 minutes later in West Texas.
The mission was initially slated to occur on 18 December before the company postponed it due to an unspecified issue found during pre-flight checks.
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The launch marked the 16th human spaceflight for Bezos’ tourism company using New Shepard, a small craft built to send people on short trips to the edge of space, as well as to conduct research missions.
The passengers included Michaela Benthaus, an aerospace engineer at the European Space Agency who was injured during a mountain biking accident in 2018. Hans Koenigsmann worked at SpaceX for two decades, most recently as the company’s vice president of avionics, before retiring in 2021.
While Blue Origin doesn’t disclose its price for a seat on one of its tourism flights, rival space tourism company Virgin Galactic charges around $600,000 (€512,000) for a similar experience.
In April, pop star Katy Perry, Bezos’ fiancee Lauren Sánchez and CBS News host Gayle King took the flight, becoming part of the first all-female crew to go to space in more than 60 years.
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The company also operates its much larger, heavy-lift New Glenn rocket, which is capable of delivering spacecraft and satellites to orbit and beyond.
Blue Origin completed a successful second flight of New Glenn in November, in which the rocket deployed two Mars-bound NASA spacecraft and nailed the landing of its reusable booster on a barge in the Atlantic.