Blue Origin will launch its latest manned flight on Thursday from Van Horn, Texas, with the goal of crossing the Kármán line, the boundary between space and Earth’s atmosphere.
This is the eighth time Blue Origin has sent a group of people into space on one of its New Shepard vehicles. New Shepard has already completed 25 launches.
Passengers on this trip include Rob Ferl, a professor at the University of Florida, and Karsen Kitchen, a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Ferl, the director of the university’s Astraeus Space Institute, will conduct an experiment during the mission that looks at how organisms respond to spaceflight. He will be the first NASA-funded researcher to conduct an experiment of any kind on a commercial spaceflight.
Kitchen, a senior at North Carolina University, will be the youngest woman to cross the Kármán Line.
The four passengers are Nicolina Elrick, an entrepreneur living in Singapore; Eugene Grin, a Ukrainian-born businessman who has lived in the United States for decades; Eiman Jahangir, a cardiologist and professor at Vanderbilt University Medical Center; and Ephraim Rabin, an American-Israeli businessman and CEO of a technology company.
“I feel an overwhelming sense of gratitude and anticipation within me,” Elrick posted on X on Monday. “The countdown has begun and I am beyond excited for what lies ahead.”
Dwight was one of six people on board the final spaceflight in May, the first manned flight for Blue Origin in nearly two years.
It returned to the skies for another unmanned mission in December 2023 before Dwight began its flight on May 19.
