Next Blue Origin space tourism flight will launch youngest woman above the Kármán line

Blue Origin has announced the crew for its next New Shepard space tourism flight.

The diverse crew includes a NASA-funded researcher, a professor, a university student, a cardiologist and entrepreneurs, Blue Origin announced in a statement on Wednesday (July 24). 

The announcement signals that Blue Origin is ready to resume flights, having tackled an issue that saw the capsule on its previous crewed flight — NS-25 this past May — touch down using just two of its three parachutes.

The upcoming NS-26 mission will carry Nicolina Elrick, Rob Ferl, Eugene Grin, Dr. Eiman Jahangir, Karsen Kitchen and Ephraim Rabin. 

Elrick is a philanthropist and entrepreneur, while Ferl is a professor and director at the University of Florida's Astraeus Space Institute. Grin was born in Ukraine and emigrated to the US in 1979, forging a career in real estate and finance. Jahangir is a cardiologist and associate professor at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, and Rabin is an American-Israeli businessman, philanthropist and entrepreneur.

Kitchen, a senior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, will become the youngest woman ever to cross the Kármán line, according to the statement. The Kármán line, at 62 miles (100 kilometers) in altitude, is a commonly used definition of the boundary for where space begins. 

But it's not the only one; NASA and the U.S. military, for example, award astronaut wings to anyone who gets above 50 miles (80 km). Eighteen-year-old Anastatia Mayers is the youngest person to reach space by that definition, getting 55 miles (88.5 km) up during a Virgin Galactic flight in August 2023.

Blue Origin, owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, did not reveal a date for the upcoming launch. The mission will, however, be the second New Shepard flight this year. 

The company's space tourism launches had halted in fall 2022 after the NS-23 uncrewed research mission suffered a serious anomaly. This was determined to be caused by a "thermo-structural failure" of the nozzle of the rocket's reusable BE-3PM engine. The first-stage rocket was destroyed, but the upper-stage capsule landed safely using its parachutes.

Lifting off from West Texas, the upcoming mission will be the 26th overall New Shepard launch (hence the name) and eighth space tourism mission for Blue Origin. The previous flight, NS-25, carried the United States' first-ever Black astronaut candidate, 90-year-old sculptor, author and former U.S. Air Force Capt. Ed Dwight.